I thought about calling this post “Infinite Jesting,” but it’s not just about David Foster Wallace, and what’s more, I haven’t even read his greatest opus. Considering how little I knew the man — at least on a rational, quantifiable level — I’m amazed at how utterly shattered I’ve been since his suicide a week ago last Friday. Every time I’ve brought him up in conversation with anyone, I’ve broken down in a helpless torrent of tears, as if he’d been a beloved friend, or even an older brother.
At the risk of sounding crazy (when has that ever stopped me?) I’ll divulge that I was seized by dark, self-destructive thoughts and urges all during that week myself, and that they were at their depressive worst on Friday. My more psychically inclined friends are convinced there’s a direct connection; I don’t know about that, but I marvel at the synchronicity.
Friday evening, in fact, I found myself contemplating the feasibility of emptying a pint of whisky and going down to the railyards by the river to wait for one of those freight trains that come clacking and wailing through the city late at night, so I could throw myself under it in the dark (properly anaesthetized), and no one would be the wiser until daybreak. Maybe even write ‘DNR’ in permanent magic marker across my chest, just for good measure. (What, after all, could be worse than a botched attempt, and the pity and disfigurement and permanent disability that might attend it?)
While I was entertaining this morbid little scenario in my head, an hour behind me in California David was tying the noose.
At the time, of course, I had no idea. Now before you go calling the paramedics, let me say that I hadn’t felt quite that self-destructive for a while. Besides, I suspect (if the wildly popular PostSecret blog is any gauge) that such thoughts are far more prevalent (even “normal”) than most people will admit. If my confession shocks you, I’m probably just breaking a cultural taboo. At any rate, by Saturday night I had shifted out of that frame of mind, and that’s when I read the news. A sharp shiver passed through my entire body, and sudden sadness landed in my chest with a leaden thud. Writing a few initial words about him on my blog, I shed tears for this relative stranger.
**
David Foster Wallace. In the rare taped interview, he appeared as a 90s grunge-nerd, like the unassuming bassist in the garage band, with his ubiquitous bandanna and his long hair, pale, bespectacled, soft-spoken, betraying the occasional tic and stammer, clearly ill at ease with the camera’s eye. He reminded me of so many of my classmates at St. John’s College, the “Great Books school,” which by virtue of its curriculum attracted brilliant, serious, abstracted, entirely non-materialistic young men whose greatest passion in life was thinking. I could definitely see myself staying up with David in the basement coffee shop of McDowell Hall until one in the morning discussing Hume. (I would probably have been mentally jogging and panting to keep up with the long strides of his churning mind.) He would have been a friend for sure. Not a lover, I think, but a good friend. If I talk about him, then, with too great a familiarity, forgive me — he just felt so familiar.
Well versed in the ways of postmodern academia and its infatuation with irony and avant-garde arcana and snark, David (who could way out-footnote Nabokov) demonstrated an unfashionable commitment to sincerity and authenticity and (what he called in his 1996 conversation with Salon) “that feeling in the stomach, which is why we read.” He wanted to create work that challenged his readers intellectually while making them feel “like someone was talking to (them) rather than striking a number of poses.” Newsweek wrote a fine elegy shedding light upon the “terrible master” that was David’s teeming brain; I won’t reiterate everything here, but suffice it to say that while he emphatically believed that solipsism — the generally empirically sound conclusion that one’s own perceiving consciousness is, in fact, the center of the universe — is a sucky orientation to call home, he also acknowledged the terrible loneliness of being a singular, bounded, perceiving consciousness. Writing and reading were a way of reaching out.
We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside.
This has always been my take, bounded as I feel within the walls of my own infernally solitary unit of human consciousness. How jealous I am of those fluid, blissful, mystic types who claim to experience the seamless oneness of all things! My circumscribed brain more often than not feels like a prison — a prison where I am intermittently but masterfully tortured.
I’ll wager it was similar for David, who urged the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College to avoid “getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head” — the advice of many a Zen master and spiritual teacher — and went on to say
…learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.
What was happening in my own brain those few dark days last week was a constant monologue of repetitive and despairing thoughts masquerading as the only truth. A longtime sufferer of depression myself, I’m skeptical of all the strictly biochemical explanations for it, including those that go swirling around in the wake of suicides. Comparative religion scholar Huston Smith, among others, has observed that just because we can describe something scientifically doesn’t mean we have isolated its cause (or made full sense of it). The explanation that has always made the most sense to me is that we assist and perpetuate certain chemical cocktails within our brains when we travel well-worn synaptic paths that trigger stressful emotions. Drugs can interrupt this process and fuzz out the distress, but they don’t really address its origins.
Imagine having a brain capable of grasping every reason on earth to despair — on 24-hour overdrive. I have no doubt, too, given my comparatively modest intellect and my nevertheless oversized ego, that David’s own intense self-consciousness must have only magnified his suffering. (See The Albatross of Personal Importance for more on ego-driven suffering.) Talking to Charlie Rose, he frequently flinched and grimaced when he finished making a point, as if his incisive formulations were embarrassingly inadequate. Shame and grandiosity are the flip-side extremes within perfectionistic, hierarchical minds that tend to turn the merciless spotlight on themselves…
Grappling with isolation, despair, dread, personal inadequacy — how is it possible not to be “totally hosed?”
**
According to David, by exercising some choice over “how and what you think.” Fine advice, so it would seem, though much easier said than done. He was suggesting, as psychologists and spiritual teachers have, that we use our minds more consciously, and choose what we pay attention to.
But I’m starting to entertain the possibility, again, that this is not enough. That this is just another ploy to sustain an unsustainable status quo. (It wasn’t sustainable for him, after all.) I’m starting to wonder if I’ve let the clarity of an initial ‘aha’ more than a year ago become muddied by the assurances of those who insist I can have my cake and ego too — whether it’s the manifest-your-desires crowd or others who argue that my constructed self (or selves, as the case may be) really isn’t essentially a “parasite” that could eventually kill me. Based on how I felt that Friday, I’m pretty sure it could, and I’m not talking about just one overly zealous critical aspect of it.
You see, I felt like I’d hit a vein of gold when I first read “The problems of the mind cannot be solved on the level of the mind.” In a few sentences, Eckhart Tolle managed to negate the mountains of self-help literature, psychology, philosophy, positive-thinking new-agey type books, and religious dogma I’d plowed my way through over the years to no avail. “The study of madness is not enough to create sanity.”
All cravings are the mind seeking salvation or fulfillment in external things and in the future as a substitute for the joy of Being. As long as I am my mind, I am those cravings, those needs, wants, attachments, and aversions, and apart from them there is no “I” except as a mere possibility, an unfulfilled potential, a seed that has not yet sprouted. In that state, even my desire to become enlightened is just another craving for fulfillment or completion in the future.
I don’t know if a craving for some sort of recognition motivated David, although I do know that he told Charlie Rose that when he got it, he found that it changed nothing, and that people still didn’t recognize what he thought was important, anyway. This is interesting to those of us still laboring away under the impression that “success” will make some kind of major difference in our lives. What constitutes this effing “success,” anyway? William S. Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch as an attempt to get Allen Ginsberg to come back to him. He wound up with multiple accolades and acolytes, but no Allen. For old Bill, that may have meant failure.
I know all about that kind of failure. (My motto could be “Those who can, live; those who can’t, write.”) But what I’m trying to say is that all of this anxiety-ridden achievement (or lack thereof) is measured with a yardstick provided by the tireless but tiresome ego. I need, I crave, I hate…am I this or that enough? Am I better or worse than you? Will I ever get what I want/deserve? Who wins and who loses?
**
By chance I recently picked up a strange pink-lettered book on Kabbalah (it was free, at a festival) the thesis of which is that the root of all evil is “the desire to receive for the self alone.” This desire is known as the “Opponent” (can you say ego?), who keeps us locked up in a prison of suffering. In order to escape this prison (and “become like God”) we must practice “transformative sharing.” The greater the discomfort this sharing creates, the better it’s working to destroy the desire to receive for the self alone.
I have to say, Rabbi Berg’s clown suit story kind of got to me. He tells the story of a famous Kabbalist who goes out walking with a companion and smells the scent of the Garden of Eden wafting from a house. They go inside to investigate, and find that this wonderful scent is coming from a clown suit in the back of the owner’s closet. When they ask him about it, he blushes and recounts the following story.
The man had been trying to help a friend in financial straits, and had attempted to take up a collection among their neighbors. Failing to collect more than a pittance, he went to a local tavern where he encountered a table full of wealthy, drunken men. One of them offered to give him all the money his friend needed — on the condition that he don a clown suit and parade around the town with the lot of them in the wee hours, singing and shouting and waking up the townspeople. He reluctantly agreed to be part of this Fellini-esque scene. Of course, the angry townspeople hollered obscenities out of their windows and even emptied their chamber pots on him, and he was thoroughly disgraced in front of every last person he knew — but he obtained the money for his friend. He ran home in shame and threw the suit in the back of his closet.
When the man had finished his story, the Kabbalist looked at him with bright eyes. “That explains why this extraordinary fragrance was coming from your closet,’ he said. “Your sharing action shattered your ego so completely that a tremendous amount of Light was revealed. Indeed, so powerful is the protection that even after your death it will continue. Tell your family to bury you in the suit when you die, for it will give you immediate admission into the Garden of Eden.”
**
One of the things that makes me feel like disappearing is a feeling of perpetual humiliation. Sometimes I start to view my entire past as nothing more than a series of indignities both great and small, a sort of decades-long hazing, while my present appears to be only a ripe opportunity for more of the same. Underlying this nearly intolerable feeling is the thwarted egoic craving to be respected, sought after, esteemed and desired, and to get what I want for a change, regardless of whether it costs anyone else. Gimmeeeeeee! Despairing of this, I actually start to question whether life is worth living.
The assumption that gives rise to such a question is that life is about getting what’s coming to you (“receiving for the self alone”). Certainly this is quintessentially American. (Just look at the wonders it’s worked on Wall Street!) What hit me so hard reading the Kabbalah story was the idea that relinquishing this assumption can be a painful and humiliating, but perhaps ultimately worthwhile, process. What if everything I’ve regarded as a failure, slight, or slap in the face has been a necessary step toward not “coming into my own,” but getting out of myself? What if sharing what (credit, responsibilities, attention, people) I don’t want to share is exactly what I need to do?
When we live in ego nature, sharing is an unnatural act. Sharing violates the ego’s fundamental survival need: I want it for myself. This is a deep, dark pit, an unscratchable itch, a bottomless longing destined never to be filled.
David once (a bit too presciently, perhaps) noted that suicides often shoot themselves in the head — the location of that “terrible master.” I would add — maybe what they really intended to kill, however unconsiously, was their ego.
I, for one, am sick to death of mine. Tired of the same old thoughts, obsessions, anxieties, criticisms, and unsatisfied wants.
Hand me those big red Bozo shoes, Rabbi.
Recent Comments