The Basic Story 6

[dalin]

LINCOLN LITERATURE CONFERENCE

The Lincoln Literature Conference was the big turning point in the effort for our Basic Text. No more was the Book a dream, it was an evidential reality.

Greg P. and Bob B. came from the Board of Trustees. Maybe fifty members showed up in all. Jim N. as chair of the hosting Lincoln Literature Committee had arranged for the Conference to use the downtown Lincoln U.S. post office building. They had the hall ways on the ground floor. N.A. signs were posted in the windows. They worked on long folding tables and had plenty of room to work. Many participants stayed at Jim's home with his wife Donna.

The WLC had no funds to give the host community in Lincoln. Through discussion and planning, they located some typewriters and a copier that a local company was able to donate. Money was needed for supplies to run the equipment. There was so much support within the Lincoln N.A. Fellowship that several members went to a blood bank and sold blood to raise money to meet the expenses.

Work went on all day and talk went on all night. The work really got underway about Wednesday. They taped the sessions as had been done in Wichita. Minutes were kept a little more vigorously after last year's terrible experience.

Jim called to order and turned the first workshop over to Bo as Chair of the World Lit Committee. Bo thanked the members for coming and introduced the trustees. Greg and Bob went over the history of the literature efforts. As the session progressed, Greg presented an idea that probably came from Jimmy himself. That the Basic Text could be expanded from the material in the White Booklet. The chapter headings were there. The arrangement of topics had stood the test of time remarkably well in the years since 1965. Greg and Bo had talked about this those first evenings in North Hollywood.

With support from attending members, Greg established a topic outline on a black board explaining that the outline was just a list of pigeon holes to be used to sort the input,which was a stack of paper about a foot thick. Eight hundred pages of hard won writing from those who had been unable to write two years earlier.

The topic outline was typed with Roman numerals for chapters, capital letters for headings, numerals for sub-headings and so forth. Copies were made on the heavy duty copier in the corner provided by the host committee. Before it was over, two copiers were busy full time.

Once the outline was generally established, the sorting of the input began. This was a tough moment for the committee. It was a decisive moment for the committee and the members worked so hard in the last few years. Some attending members knew a little about basic writing but none were professional writers. If the Basic Text dream was to become a reality, it would be here and now.

The Committee knew that it had plenty of input. They had a topic outline and the plan to enlarge the White Booklet into the Basic Text had a certain poetry to it that they knew would suit the Fellowship. Still, how does input become Book?

*** *** *** ***

The complete files of input were photocopied. Enough copies of the topic outline to give to each member of the workshop gave everybody a chance to help. Bo worked out a provisional plan to try to go over the input and make a mark to locate where on the topic outline the input would best fit. In cases where the input was relevant to two or more locations, each location was marked. This took the committee a while.

The next step was to cut up the photo copies pages and sort them into folders marked according to the topic outline. This seemed good enough and it included every piece of input without leaving out anything. Bo, along with the other workers, wanted to keep faith with the letter and spirit of the input from the Fellowship. Many people had expressed concern about how this great idea could be effected in a practical manner. This was how it happened in Lincoln.

The plot thickens . . . How does the cut and sorted input derived from member from all over get into a coherent form? This is a real blind spot in understanding the process that led to the Basic Text. Those members who were a part of this process understand and those who were not can't believe that it could have possibly worked.

The work took several days to reach this point. The Committee had become of one mind during this time. The group of members were working together in a systematic manner where all had an opportunity to say whatever was on their mind, pertinent or impertinent. There had been plenty of meals and meetings to break the tension and allow attending members to clarify their undertanding of what was happening. Many of these members had been working in local literature committees for a year or two by the time they got to Lincoln, so their experience was taking what they knew already to a deeper level. The spirit was very strong in the room.

To begin working out solutions of literary construction, the members decided to try to work up the first item from the topic outline. This way, they would see if they could get anything useful out of it. The idea was to include all the items from the input and supply bridge sentences and connective ideas as the need for them became apparent. They took a deep breath, said their prayers and plunged onward.

There was a large circle of members sitting around a group of tables to form a center. Every face was visible. The input marked 'I,A,1' was separated into piles among the group. Everyone agreed that all the pieces would be included somewhere in the cut and paste before they moved on to the next section.

Bo led the group and told the members present to trust their spirits to motivate them. He asked who felt they had the best piece of input to start the first chapter? "Come on," he said, "who's got it. Don't think about it. Let's get going. Who's got it?" He pushed the group until someone said they had something. They read it. Members from the group had eye contact and several said, "Naw. That's not it." Another read an item of input. They were close to good initial items but not quite on the mark. Finally, one of the members read an item that seemed to fit. It was, "Pain is our common denominator." The group was excited now. That was true and it fit. "Now," Bo said, "What's the next item? We still have a lot of input for this section. Who's got the next piece?"

The pace had to be a little fast. The members had to know, love and trust one another. All had to know they were equally welcome to throw up their hand and read their input. If two or more spoke simultaneously, they took turns. Bo kept the group moving fast. If they thought about it too much, they would spoil it and lose momentum. It was initial impact and transmission they were working by. After the first piece and the second and the third, they came to a point where nothing seemed to fit.

By right of what was not fitting, the group developed a rough idea of what was missing. This in turn helped them come up with what was needed to complete the thought and lead on to the next one. In the manner of input, members began speaking ideas and versions of what might fit. This went on until the group settled on one that seemed right. Enough. Move on to the next item!

It was like an auctioneering process. Everybody had to be up to participate. They went from item to item and supplied bridge sentences and paragraphs where ever needed. Finally, the paste up included all input marked 'I,A,1'. The items of input had been pasted with glue sticks onto eight and a half by elevens with page numbers written in at the top. Handwritten bridge sentences joined the items of input. Bo thanked the group and called for a fifteen minute break.

When they came together again, he started off on the next section: 'I,A,2'. After a few rounds, he passed the lead to Greg you took it up and made the calls exactly as Bo had. Soon, there were many members who had taken a turn leading the table. The fast pace, sensitivity to the material and rhythm called the reactions out of the people at the tables.

Section after section was completed. Copies of the completed cut and pastes were sent to typists set up around the corner in a separate work area. They had somehow managed to get a row of brand new IBM 'Selectrics'. This made the typed finals beautiful.

The work on the topic outline of chapters took the rest of the workshop time at Lincoln. Everybody had a hand in it. One addict who was still using was asked to leave the room respectfully. Several members of the workshop in session made clear to him that they were writing so that he need not use again against his will. Out of love, they would not let him interrupt the process. One member threw an ash tray off a table and broke it. Members of the group asked him to contain himself. Joseph helped with the filing system.

The group steadied itself to complete the process of cut and paste throughout the entire body of the material. They had been loose and open in ways and tight and organized in others. By Sunday, they had done it.

To accomplish this extensive cut and paste draft of over a hundred pages from input of eight hundred pages, they had worked in sessions lasting twelve to fifteen hours. Some individuals worked twenty hours or more. They worked in the several workshops that addressed different portions of the material, helped run the copier, helped with the files or typed. Everybody found something.

After the Lincoln Lit Conference, there was a spiritual closeness among the literature workers that only natural disaster or miraculous occurrence can arouse in human beings. The commitment to the Basic Text was now deeper than ever and shared out among member from all over who had attended.

The importance of praying for selflessness and conscious contact with the God of a members understanding was illustrated for Bo in the early phases of the Lincoln Lit Conference. He noticed during one of the sessions that the young lady seated next to him was fidgeting and squirming in her seat. She seemed in an agony of sorts.

He leaned over and whispered to her. Had she said her literature prayer, yet? Several of the WLC mailings included a prayer written to help members seeking to serve in literature find a quiet place to work, pray to know God's Will and be able to work selflessly. It included praying for God to take away the sense of selfishness and granting the ability to be used as an instrument. Bo reccomended that if she hadn't done this, she should leave the room and do it now, then come back. She said she'd try it and left the room. Five minutes later, she was at the table throwing out her comments and scanning her pile of input with the best of them.

Another especially touching moment was when a somewhat rough looking man asked for help doing his story. He could neither read nor write. He was a cowboy from the Upper Platte River country and had become addicted to morphine in the warfields of Europe in World War II. A young lady volunteered to sit with him and take down his story by hand. His sincere desire to help others will never be forgotten.

*** *** *** ***

At the end on Lincoln, everyone in attendance knew that the dream of a Book for N.A. was going to come true. They couldn't say when but they had come over the major obstacle to the work: how could it be a group effort based on Fellowship input? The idea had been around for thirty years but the reality had taken a miraculous suspension of the rules and limitations that govern people in ordinary times.

Since the cut and pastes needed to be typed up before they could present them at the annual WSC, another conference was called. There was no reason to wait until the WSC in May for direction to finish what last year's WSC had asked them to do. They were still on track with the WSC mandate to work on the Basic Text. Joseph offered to secure support for the next conference to be held in Memphis, Tennessee. It was in the lower Mid-West and the community there would love it he said. The Memphis Conference was tentatively set for early February of 1981. Announcements would confirm this. Everyone thanked each other and went home with warm hugs on the outside and warm feelings of goodness inside.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Return to Story of the Basic Text - Home Page

Go to Chapter Twelve - Getting Ready for Memphis



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[dalin]

GETTING READY FOR MEMPHIS

What had been learned about processing literature at Lincoln impacted on the Fellowship. It was a hard experience to talk about. You had to be there. Members from all over were talking about Lincoln. An attempt to have local lit committees workshop the material was made. The committee sent out the cut and pastes to local literature committees to be typed up 'we' form. This style deleted the origins of input by substituting the first person plural anywhere 'I' or 'they' or other persons were used. If this wrecked havoc with structure of a sentence or a paragraph of input, the instructions were to set it right in the best manner possible including adding sentences to make to meaning clear. Qualification was required because some 'we form' material applied to 'all of us', 'some of us' or 'a few of us'. Occasionally to include an item of input phrasing like, 'on the other hand' and 'in some instances' were necessary.

The inclusive 'we form' styling set the standard for all subsequent N.A. literature. It included a diversity of recovery experience unified by the word 'we'.

Far from being unworkable, this was a simple and easy method and the main requirement for quality was a feel for the Fellowship practices, especially the parts of recovery that were general or universal in practice. Groups comprised of members from many separate geographic regions was best for this sort of work. What they discussed was only suspected before: in instance after instance the spiritual principles of recovery proved to be universal based on written input.

The mailed cut and paste effort was a technical disaster. Although great care had been taken in the preparation of the materials sent out to the local literature committees, the instructions were literal to point of fault and referenced processing that had never before taken place in the N.A. Fellowship. The process was entirely unknown except to those few members who had attended the Lincoln Conference.

One chapter, the first, was typed up and a hundred copies were copied and bound by the Atlanta Literature Committee. A committee member named Greg R. read and followed the instructions with the help of other members and had the material produced at a nickel copy store.

Two separate things about the processing at Lincoln were hard to explain to others. First the creative unconcern that was required to cut and paste input from many sources. The occurrence of similar experience, phrasing or feeling was selected for if it was found from many diverse sources. What the literature workers thought or felt was not totally dismissed. The written input was taken to be a little more important than their experience to reduce personal bias. This helped keep personal bias from predetermining how a section would come out.

There had to be a time when the material was totally up in the air. It took a sort of tough minded faith to realize that no piece would get lost and that anything done could be improved on at a later stage of processing. It is more ordinary and therefore less offensive to proceed quietly reading each piece slowly and considering each point in detail with discussion of each new, relevant idea or concept. The trouble with this is that it is not general enough to allow a piece to be literally 'roughed in' before the more calm and deliberate procedures are applied.

Going the other route and doing it slowly is so precise that a formulation sets in too early and makes new ideas seem a threat to the fabric of the material, when in reality, all may and do occur in applied recovery situations. The roughness is expectable at this point of development. However, the effect on the uninitiated is like a thousand fingernails scratching blackboards all at once!

Some members were entirely incapable of staying in the room when this was going on even though they came back and were able to great work excepting cut and paste of raw input.

The above concerns made it difficult to do anything but generally describe the process and hope the listener or reader could follow the process. The WLC felt it had a duty to keep the Fellowship informed. Since the work took place with members present who could explain these things as the work progressed, the main attempt to explain processing was limited to the main committee and the local literature committees who also learned the techniques from their members who had attended conferences of the WLC.

The word of the Lincoln Literature Conference generated much interest and even more input. Stories came in from people who had laughed at the effort a few months before Lincoln. Belief that a serious effort was underway was spreading from the reality of what was happening.

*** *** *** ***

The now approved 'Literature Handbook' helped give lit workers everywhere a common information base. The monthly letters took care of the breakthroughs and new events to be considered by a growing body of hundreds of members from Frankfurt, Germany to Sydney, Australia.

Naturally, the growth of the WLC was viewed with some alarm by the previously unchallenged WSO as Fellowship information center. Since much of the printing and mailing was done for the WLC from Memphis, there was a growing concern that Memphis wanted to be the location for a new WSO! Again, while some members may have thought this was a good idea, the main Committee never entertained the motion. To Bo, such talk was merely another in a long list of potential distractions and side issues.

Bo spent five to ten hours on the phone daily. The rest of the time went to correspondence. His marriage and business was slowly falling apart. He still served as Atlanta Lit Chair and editor of the monthly 'Rainbow Connection' newsletter.

Plans for the Memphis Literature Conference that it was going to be a pull out the stops effort. Planned to be nine days long and running twenty-four hours a day, it would easily be the longest and most demanding conference in the history of Narcotics Anonymous. The Lincoln Lit Conference had gone through 20,000 photocopies and Memphis was going to be held at Memphis State University in an unused conference room in a student dorm. Plenty of floor space. A dozen or more 'Selectrics' and two heavy duty copy machines were going to provide the equipment base. As many as a hundred members were expected to show up.

Among the considerations that had to be considered was the sincerity of the members involved. No one was coming to the literature conferences for fun or glamour. It was not socially acceptable to be doing this. As with any new thing, there was a mystique of utter sincerity, hard work and faith. Unlike some veneers, this mystique was real and ran to the core of those committed to getting a Basic Text for Narcotics Anonymous. Whatever they needed, they could come get. It was happening.

Memphis seemed like the last great chance before the effort became politicized by others who would come just to be a part of something big. It was the sincerity of the courageous early supporters that thrilled and excited Bo. His studied and personal experiences had taught him how beautiful and rare such a phenomenon was in human history, much less in these times.

When Bo got home, he looked through the files only to find that major portions of the material were entirely missing. Joseph had been in charge of keeping the files and much as he hated the idea, it seemed that some of the material had been stolen. Waves of anger and betrayal washed over him. He took another look and it seemed like the best material was gone. What was he to do?

He thought about all the people that had come to do the work. How could it be that they were going to have to make up the work? Had his higher power been sleeping, to let such a thing happen. Finally, he called Joseph, hoping that there would be some reasonable explanation.

At first, Joseph was aghast. He seemed as surprised as Bo had been. Was he faking it? Bo went on to specify and describe the missing material by the headings on the empty file folders. Joseph started asking questions. Then he told Bo that the material wasn't missing. That he had established the headings himself and that the contents never developed for some of the committees topic outline slots. All the file folders had been marked in advance and the contents inserted as they were developed by the committee's processing.

Bo had learned a great lesson: one that was to help preserve the unity and forward force of the spiritual service they had undertaken. Don't trust appearances. Be willing to dig for facts and get past the emotions so quick to present themselves as if they were facts.

Keeping the principles in and the personalities out had been a matter of quickness. Even though years had passed since the original discussions with Greg who had moved to Oregon, the time was quick in terms of the movement of ideas among even such a comparatively small group of ten or twenty thousand people. Those with prestige and reputation to uphold had held back. The little guys had been proving to themselves and to the N.A. world the magnificence that lies in each recovering addict. It had been a real thrill for Bo to watch the spirit come out in himself and these others and do the work accomplished so far.

Bo didn't prejudice himself against outstanding people; he had just been studying people and life for meaning and purpose. Most of the world religions predicated that God was in all people and even that it was the same God, despite all exterior forms: age, race, sex, time period, geographic location, language and culture. Through the work on the N.A. Book, he was getting to see the miracle happen in fascinating slow motion.

One of the oddities which first showed at Wichita, and was evident even more at Lincoln, was the way the members seemed to step beyond their ordinary limitations. People who hadn't finished high school were editing with a refinement and technical sensitivity to phrasing and tone that would have done credit to PHD's. If they had been forced to present credentials, they would have shrunk down into their personal boundaries. Through the Spirit of N.A., they could expand far beyond these limitations and by forgetting themselves in an effort to help others reveal the deep, true and oh so beautiful spirit within. This was Bo's higher power now. He worshiped it through service to N.A.

There is a saying in the anonymous programs that you can get so spiritual that you're no earthly good. The commitment to service and to the Basic Text had long since exceeded the boundaries of reason for Bo. His Dad saved his business a time or two. His wife did sweet little things and made the old ramshackle house on Atlanta Road in Marietta into a home. It took much love and courage on her part. The children were growing but not yet school age, thank God.

Whether it was the disease or the unlikeliness of it all, there was considerable stress involved for Bo as well as the other active lit workers of the times. Maybe the simple trouble was that they were doing work with no formal support system. If they had been doctors or scientists, their work would have fit into a specialized, recognized groove and they would have had a different sort of support. Instead, the ground they were breaking was more dependent on a special kind of truth and the trappings that go with formalized support system would have hindered or prevented the work they were doing.

When Bo prayed, he still had the feeling that they were doing a good thing and that they were on the right track. His personal program had progressed. He had taken his own inventory and could see where his defects had been working against him, not for him. He had been able to admit, share and willingly ask God to remove any hindrance to doing God's will. He had made initial amends and found it to be a healing process although he could not control the when but only the who of the amends.

His involvement with personal service beyond his committee service extended to about twenty people he sponsored and his membership in a home group that was for three years, the longest N.A. meeting in the world. The 'Survivor's Group' lasted seven or eight hours every Saturday night from eleven o'clock to just before sunrise Sunday morning. Most often the group would go then to the mountain and meditate while the sun came up. Afterward, they would go to a nearby omelette shop and talk about N.A.

As using addicts, many of us had spent a great deal of time talking about the troubles of the world and the many things we would do better if we got the chance. The more our addiction progressed, and the worse we felt about ourselves, the greater the fantasies we would create about how we would change the world someday. We had truly outrageous dreams and no aspect of life from the cold bloodedness of the establishment, to war and the general sense of inhumanity was sacrosanct to us. Additionally, our irrational meanderings were couched in terms of ultimate morality. The more our addiction cut us off from our feelings, the more desperate we became to wringing every ounce of emotion from the tragedy of it all, without even seeing ourselves as centers of the tragedy. Something awful was happening to us and we projected our feelings outward. Our hilarity while using reflected our hysteria instead of good humor.

Our early recovery experienced is in many ways based on these 'high' standards. In time, we may become more realistic. The part of the dreams that append to the genuine heartfelt feelings are likely to remain with us but find new outlets.

So, is it any wonder that clean addicts armed with faith, hope and each other, imbued in spiritual principles, would undertake this great work in all seriousness and humility.

At the time it was considered and discussed that if the Twelve Steps of N.A. could do for addicts in general what A.A. had done for alcohol addicts in particular, then the effort would be worth any personal price we had to pay to move the effort forward.

We were willing to do the work because our individual and collective conscience would not allow us to be dissuaded from our task for any reason. We looked neither to the left nor to the right but straight ahead to the goal: the one thing we could not do in our active addiction.

Doing the work for no money, nor any other personal benefit, was used to raise the spiritual value of the work beyond what institutions could raise with all their money, credentials and prestige. We had to win the hearts of our people for the work to progress. Selflessness was a basic imperative if the work was to go forward. Bo realized that as the one others looked to, he had to disclaim any desire for money and set a pace for himself sufficiently hard to get results from the efforts of others who would follow his example.

It is worth mentioning that one of the keys to working with other addicts on the Basic Text was telling each new potential worker that no one any where knew why N.A. worked. Plus the book work was not an effort to determine that. Then Bo could see the member visibly relax and ask the questions they had about the work. It always seemed to Bo that the real interworkings of the Twelve Step recovery process involved some deeper aspects of human beings and it was akin to sacrilege to try to figure it all out. Kind of like dissecting a woman to see why she was beautiful. Describing the recovery process and what was said and heard in our meetings was acceptable and doable. It was non-interuptive to describe the beauty without defining it.

*** *** *** ***

The Memphis Literature Conference was scheduled to begin Saturday and run through the following Sunday nine days later.

A big screen print job delayed Bo's departure. A dozen or so member showed up at his house in Marietta and worked with him on the big job so they could all leave. It involved specialized processes that no one knew how to do but they could follow instructions and as a group they had to innovate solutions to various problems connected with doing the job. Bo could have just said to hell with the order but there were the usual bills to be paid and he felt badly to let down a customer, much less his wife and children by leaving them all in a lurch.

The hidden benefit in all this was that by the time they completed the job and left for Memphis, they were accustomed to working together as a team.

As a note of interest, one member from Miami confessed that the notion he had thought up was that the Book was already written and that members were simply being called in to co-sign the material. One measure of the closeness that the members felt was that instead of keeping this to himself, he had come out and shared it.

They came in a car and a Volkswagen bus. They took the interstate through Nashville and would have stopped for a meeting if it had been later.

As they drove down through the mountains of Tennessee toward the flatlands approaching Memphis, Bo looked up and saw the sun breaking through the clouds in a distinct set of rays. He counted them and there were twelve in all. He asked other members riding in the bus and sure enough, there were twelve rays in all.

They followed the map into Memphis State University and found the dorm where the Conference was already in progress. They whooshed in with the momentum from the past two days still carry- ing them.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Return to Story of the Basic Text - Home Page

Go to Chapter Thirteen - Memphis Literature Conference



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------