It's with a little fear that I write about author David Foster Wallace because what I have to say runs the very real risk of turning a tragic death into a grossly perveted self-exploitation piece. But I can't rightly put this event to rest any other way at the moment.
When my wife and I lived in Madison, Wisconsin, we got a chance to see Wallace give a reading at a local bookstore on State Street. I purchased Infinite Jest right before the reading with eager anticipation of delving into his fiction (I had mainly known him through his audacious and comedic essays). Before he read, he told the audience that he was "slightly agoraphobic" and that his pace might speed up as he went.
He was somewhat ill at ease in a public setting, something I immediately identified with as I was struggling with similar social anxiety issues in grad school. After the reading, my wife and I stood in line for him to sign our books. It was a bit painful to watch, actually. While he conversed happily enough with people, he was also demonstrably laboring, wiping his brow on several occasions. I'm pretty sure this was one of the last things he wanted to be doing.
I don't mean that in the sense that he didn't like the interaction with other people rather I had the impression that he didn't like the OBLIGATION that now is part and parcel of book promotions. I felt slightly guilty for playing a part of this strange ritual we now have where it's common expected practice to have the opportunity to be face-to-face with authors.
I won't lie, I didn't finish or even make it halfway through Infinite Jest. I can't say exactly why - it was always engaging, but the pieces of the story were so far apart that I couldn't sustain a focused interest. There was one segment in the book, though, that was unlike any of the other pieces and sketches of characters and situations.
Around page 70, he introduces us to Kate Gompert who is in a psych ward's suicide watch unit. The piece involves a dialogue between a psych ward physician and Gompert in which she very poignantly describes how she feels. The raw and straightforward explanation she gives was devastating and heartbreaking.
Fast forward to 1999. My wife and I had moved back to Missoula and we both had jobs. We just started living in the upstairs of a house my wife's parents bought, paying them rent. We were progressing into an adult lifestyle even though I felt no different than I did in college. With fall came the news that my wife was pregnant and I was going to be a dad.
The excitement of the news only lasts so long before you realize you have 8 or so months left before the big event. During this time, the company I was working for hit a brick wall with new projects and layoffs ensued - cutting the staff nearly in half. I was lucky not to be one of the victims, but the reality of how precarious the real world can be was not lost on me.
It's possible that both my impending fatherhood and the brush with economic insecurity were what led me to some painful panic attacks beginning right when the amount of daylight decreases noticeably in the late fall. I got on Paxil and xanax but every day...every hour...drove me deeper into anxiety and depression. It got to the point where I couldn't see daylight, I couldn't get out of bed, I couldn't eat, I couldn't think of the past or the future...something had creeped inside me and was taking me down and I felt helpless to stop it.
In a couple of weeks, the medication suddenly started to work and I felt myself return to form and it was like I had been freed by some beast who decided it no longer wanted me. What I came to realize was that I had experienced clinical depression, an event that signicantly changed my outlook on the nature of my own humanity and gave me insight into the fallacy of the mind/body duality. I had to accept what I didn't want to - that I am not solely responsible for my mood and state of mind.
As I began thinking about the experience and trying to describe it to others, it dawned on me that Wallace had NAILED it with uncanny accuracy in that piece with Kate Gompert. The extended segment quoted below are passages of the dialogue between her and the doctor (I'm not well versed in copyright law to know if this is excessive quoting. If it is, I can cut this down):
Kate: "I think there must be probably different types of suicides. I'm not one of the self-hating ones. The type of like 'I'm shit and the world'd be better off without poor me' type that says that but also imagines what everybody'll say at their funeral."
....
"I didn't want to especially hurt myself. Or like punish. I don't hate myself. I just wanted out. I didn't want to play anymore is all."
.......
Doctor: "What I'm trying to ask, I think, is whether this feeling you're communicating is the feeling you associate with your depression."
Her gaze moved off, "That's what you guys want to call it, I guess."
......
Kate: "When peole call it that I always get pissed off because I always think depression sounds like you just get like really sad, you get quiet and melancholy and just like sit quietly by the window sighing or just lying around. A state of not caring about anything. A kind of blue kind of peaceful state."
......
"Well this" - she gestured at herself - "isn't a state. This is a feeling. I feel it all over. In my arms and legs."
"That would include your carp - your hands and feet?"
"All over. My head, throat, butt. In my stomach. It's all over everywhere. I don't know what I could call it. It's like I can't get enough outside it to call it anything. It's like horror more than sadness. It's more like horror. It's like something horrible is about to happen, the most horrible thing you can imagine - no, worse than you can imagine because there's the feeling that there's something you have to do right away to stop it but you don't know what it is you have to do..."
....
"I fear this feeling more than I fear anything, man. More than pain. or my mom dying or environmental toxicity. Anything."
.....
"Listen," she said. "Have you ever felt sick? I mean nauseous, like you knew you were going to throw up?"
The doctor made a gesture like Well sure.
"But that's just in your stomach," Kate Gompert said. "It's a horrible feeling but it's just in your stomach. That's why the term is 'sick to your stomach.'" .... "What I told Dr. Garton is OK but imagine if you felt that way all over, inside. All through you. Like every cell and every atom or brain-cell or whatever was so nauseous it wanted to throw up. but it couldn't, and you felt that way all the time, and you're sure, you're positive the feeling will never go away, you're going to spend the rest of your natural life feeling like this."
Nothing I've read about depression has more accurately described what I experienced since then. So, naturally, I've drawn from this passage when trying to describe to people what it's like to be clinically depressed and how I have a much more open sense of understanding when I hear about suicide. There are people I encounter who are quick to judge those who commit suicide as selfish and weak. I know better. And I have the feeling David Foster Wallace knew better.
I can't possibly know what led Wallace to hang himself, nor am I saying he felt like his description of Gompert's feelings. It's just that to know that someone who captured the very essence of serious depression died of suicide is troubling and I don't know what to make of it. It's not so much personal worry about what it says for my long-term success in dealing with mental health issues. My depression bouts have been that intense but much more brief (two or three days) and far more apart than the fictional Kate Gompert's was.
Reading that passage (and I have gone back to it on several occasions) has always given me a sense of comfort and, during the few times I have experienced depression, I felt less alone knowing that the fictional Kate Gompert knew how I felt.
What I'm struggling with is that he had the perspective, the knowledge of the transience of mood and feelings and still went ahead with it. Can we understand this? Most would say 'no.' I'm not sure. I think it's a huge and tragically unacknowledged social responsibility to at least TRY to understand why people kill themselves. I think we owe it to David Foster Wallace and to those who go through depression to make that effort.
The human soul is not an isolated entity that exists indendently of our bodies. Nor is it solely the responsibility of the individual. It is in fact indelibly PART of our body and our mind and if we are living in world where the soul can not withstand the abuses of the body and mind, then we are failing.
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Comments
To speak to your blog specifically, if you have David Foster Wallace to thank for your ability to recognize and verbalize ways for others to feel you and empathize with your experience than I have him to thank too, because through reading your writing over time I have come to a wiser and more empathetic understanding of depression and anxiety than I feel I would have arrived at without having the unique pleasure of learning from you. You're doing a great job and you're helping the world to not fail. I look forward to more and more from you in here.
It's probably cliche but what you're saying about how you found comfort in knowing that someone else, this character, felt how you did or how you had - that release of knowing that you're not alone, that's a big message for me out of all this reflection. We are not alone! Sorry for gushing, thanks for another fantastic entry.
Hopefully, before I slip past the point where I can do things for myself, I will kiss my shotgun goodbye.
You raise THE point and I honestly don't have an answer. Because I lean toward the idea of a "collective soul" (not the band), I have a bias toward the idea that we are not simply islands and that the greater social world influences our mind, body and soul. I can't pin that down into anything tangible, it's just the perspective I have on this. I'm not blaming anyone for my experiences but I also think there is some relationship between my mind/body/soul and the world we live in.
This is only a faint leaning probably due to the fact that the other alternative (we are just individuals wholly responsible for our success and failure) is too upsetting for me to accept.
He does describe depression and anxiety perfectly. Depression isn't being sad. There isn't a good enough word for what it is. More like "Anxiety Fire" or "Violet Violent Crawling Darkness." Unless you've had it, you can't get to that feeling, and those people that have never been there are lucky.
It isn't wrong to think of or talk about someone who has died and confront those things that may have killed him, I don't believe. He was incredible; you are incredible. We all are. Making the effort to understand our fellow man is the best sort of acknowledgment of life. Thanks for what you wrote.
There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.
(rated)
Not nothingness, not lethargy (although that may be an outer manifestation). Instead an incredible horror, an active pain all over the insides. Just not wanting to live, plain and simple. Not being able to take it anymore.
You know who else gets it right? JK Rowling in Harry Potter when she describes the dementors who suck the happiness out of life, who simply take away the will to live--no, who make one wish to die. When you read passages like this, you know the author knows.
Depression is one of those subjects that I hate to write about because there is so much to say and it feels impossible to say it exactly right and it feels so important to transmit exactly what it is so as not to be misunderstood. I think some of us just can barely stand the idea of its being trivialized.
Thank you Yabloniwitz, for doing this topic justice. And your confusion over how to feel about someone's giving in to the monster, someone who seemed at first able to transcend it, well that's just natural. It reminds me of the disconcerting feeling of learning that a priest commits suicide. Ultimately Depression is a godless state (no judgment whatsoever there), a place where there is no hope. If nothing else, religion is meant to offer hope, so when the peddlers of it succumb, you wonder if it's all a facade.
I said the same thing about the Dementors to my wife when we read those books!
Thanks for your comment and your kind words.
Matt, your writing quite literally brings tears to my eyes. Does that come easy or do you labor for hours to post such a perfect gem?
lps, your question is one I've asked myself often. As someone who has been overcome by Depression, I am at a loss when loved ones suffer from it. It's confounding. I can think of no other condition or illness which, in spite of personal knowledge, offers so little in the way of insight into alleviating the pain of others who suffer the same thing.
One cold night in Ketchum
A single shotgun blast
Whatever future waiting
Became part of the past–
The brave war correspondent
Dashing, debonair
The archetype prose-poet
Seductive savoir-faire
The bright eyes always dancing
The full-faced easy laugh
The deeper, darker meaning
Revealed in photograph
The boozing and the wenching
The proving you’re a man
Surrendering to passion
He couldn’t understand–
From high up on Olympus
From being all the rage
To promise grown impotent
To staring, empty page–
His finger on the trigger
Illusion of control
The matador triumphant
Such death becomes the soul
For whom the bells are tolling
We all are less, I think
Papa put his pen down
He has run out of ink
©2000 Tom Cordle
i remember flashes of the night my body failed me for the first time in 1997 these images are like the fisher price viewfinder toys we had as kids where you could put the circle disk in the red toy and flip the lever through the frames one by one the first auditory image is someone pulling my labrador retriever madison off of the emt, our newborn crying , the ceiling of my front porch and the bright stars of the winter sky, the blankets were warm, and wondering strangely enough what exit the ambulance was going to take to the hospital, were they going to take the cedar street exit or shoot straight up montana ave i recall the name on the emt’s jacket being skinner and wondering if he was the dad of a kid i went to high school with then the accusations what drug was i taking tonight, what am i on, no one believing that anyone at my age could be such a teetotaler, then the scans, the diagnosis, misdiagnosis, and then the final understanding of epilepsy the shame of being broken i also think this is the night my marriage started to move toward failure partners moving toward caregivers and not being able to return but now nearly 13 years later i can look at the incredible resiliency of my body and the electrical impulses and circuitry that make up who i am eight years without a seizure, my body and mind physically and emotionally strong hell last night at 9pm i drove out to the gates of the mountains and kayaked under the full moon