The Bookbat

"One fellow psychotically depressed patient Kate Gompert came to know at Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Newton two years ago was a man in his fifties. He was a civil engineer whose hobby was model trains—like from Lionel Trains Inc, etc.—for which he erected incredibly intricate systems of switching and track that filled his basement recreation room. His wife brought photofraphs of the trains and networks of trellis and track into the locked ward, to help remind him. The man said he had been suffering from psychotic depression for seventeen straight years, and Kate Gompert had no reason to disbelieve him. He was stocky and scart with thinning hair and hands that he held very still in his lap as he sat. Twenty years ago he had slipped on a patch of 3-in-1 brand oil from his model-train tracks and bonked his head on the cement floor of his basement rec room in Wellesley Hills, and when he woke up in the E.R. he was depressed beyond all human endurance, and stayed that way. He’d never once tried suicide, though he confessed that he yearned for unconsciousness without end. His wife was very devoted and loving. She went to Catholic Mass every day. She was very devout. The psychotically depressed man, too, went to daily Mass when he was not institutionalized. He prayed for relief. He still had his job and his hobby. He went to work regularly, taking medical leaves only when the invisible torment got too bad for him to trust himself, or when there was some radical new treatment the psychiatrists wanted him to try. They’d tried Tricyclics, M.A.O.I.s, insulin-comas, Selective-Seratonin-Reuptake Inhibitors, the new and side-effect-laden Quadricyclics. They’d scanned his lobes and affective matrices for lesions and scars. Nothing worked. Not even high-amperage E.C.T. relieved it. This happens sometimes. Some cases of depression are beyond human aid. The man’s case gave Kate Gompert the howling fantods. The idea of this man going to work and to Mass and building miniaturized railroads day after day after day while feeling anything like what Kate Gompert felt in that ward was simply beyond her ability to imagine. The rationo-spiritual part of her knew this man and his wife must be possessed of a courage way off any sort of known courage-chart. But in her toxified soul Kate Gompert felt only a paralyzing horror at the idea of the squat dead-eyed man laying toy track slowly and carefully in the silence of his wood-panelled rec room, the silence total except for the sounds of the track being oiled and snapped together and laid into place, the man’s head full of poison and worms and every cell in his body screaming for relief from flames no one else could help with or even feel."

I missed DFW’s birthday, I know. I am making up for it today.

When I read Infinite Jest this summer, I was as close to suicide as I have ever been. (I am not that close now, but for awhile I couldn’t remember what it felt like, and now I do, and I do not welcome that knowledge.) I honestly hope to never again feel as thoroughly turned out and known by any book as I felt while reading Infinite Jest. It was an absolutely sublime experience to have exactly once.

When things get very bad for me, the only thing I know how to do is remind myself that feeling does not necessarily entail knowing. That I can despair as much as I want to, but it doesn’t mean the despair is justified. That I have my own truth but I am not required to believe it.

It’s a comfort but it frightens me too—because it requires me to admit that whatever good things there are in life are, at times, totally inaccessible to me. I can’t possibly know them. I don’t have the proper equipment.

(And then sometimes I do, and thank fuck for those times, and thank fuck that usually medication at least sort of kicks that equipment into gear. I am unspeakably lucky in that respect.)

DFW knows that. He knows all those techniques you develop for moving yourself into the place where you don’t know (because in the place where you do know, the only knowledge that exists is that the world is defiled and that you yourself are so defiled that you are unworthy of existence, even in the defiled world). It’s a thing that makes me grit my teeth about the way that the Kenyon College speech has been disseminated to the world: I don’t want to hear that wisdom repeated by people who have never desperately needed to wrench themselves away from their own perspectives and who therefore don’t know how deeply scary it is. But I want to hear it from DFW, because I trust that he knows, and I trust that he has worked for that knowledge and that the work has made him good, in some way that people who haven’t done it don’t understand. Which is not to say that the depressed are somehow superior to anyone else—just that all work makes you better, in small and specific ways.

I haven’t learned to do that work yet. I’m not good. I’m very self-indulgent. And seeing someone who has done the work and learned the good and still wanted to die more than he wanted anything else: well. It’s scary.

I have to imagine that the quote above explains how DFW felt about writing at times. It’s certainly how I feel, when things get dark. Sitting in a silent room, trying to link things together so that they form some recognizable shape, and hating the things you make, hating every potential thing that could ever be made, hating your ability to make things, hating your inability to make things the way you want to make them.

People who turn that into worthwhile art are incredible to me.

People who turn that into worthwhile art and kill themselves anyway are incredible in a very different way.