David Foster Wallace

For you, if you attain your goal and cannot find some way to transcend the experience of having that goal be your entire existence, your raison de faire, so, then, one of two things we see will happen.

One, one is that you attain the goal and realize the shocking realization that attaining the goal does not complete or redeem you, does not make everything for your life “OK” as you are, in the culture, educated to assume it will do this, the goal. And then you face this fact that what you had thought would have the meaning does not have the meaning when you get it, and you are impaled by shock. We see suicides in history by people at these pinnacles;

Backbone – David Foster Wallace

“the universe [is] an infinite system of neural connections that had evolved, at it’s highest point, an organism that could sustain consciousness of both itself and the universe at the same time, such that the human nervous system became the universe’s way of being aware of and thus accessible to itself.”

Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace (1996)

(On life and tennis)

“You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place.”

 

(On One Hitters)

A one-hitter, sort of like a long FDR-type cigarette holder whose end is packed with a pinch of good dope, gets hot and is hard on the mouth — the brass ones especially — but one-hitters have the advantage of efficiency: every particle of ignited pot gets inhaled; there’s none of the incidental secondhand-type smoke from a party bowl’s big load, and Hal can take every iota way down deep and hold his breath forever, so that even his exhalations are no more than slightly pale and sick-sweet-smelling.

Total utilization of available resources = lack of publicly detectable waste.

Plus one-hitters are small, which is good, because let’s face it, anything you use to smoke high-resin dope with is going to stink. A bong is big, and its stink is going to be like commensurately big, plus you have the foul bong-water to deal with. Pipes are smaller and at least portable, but they always come with only a multi-hit party bowl that disperses nonutilized smoke over a wide area. A one-hitter can be wastelessly employed, then allowed to cool, wrapped in two baggies and then further wrapped and sealed in a Ziploc and then enclosed in two sport-socks in a gear bag along with the lighter and eyedrops and mint-pellets and the little film-case of dope itself, and it’s highly portable and odor-free and basically totally covert.

**

(On Suicide)

Kate Gompert stared at a point over the man’s left shoulder. ‘I wasn’t trying to hurt myself. I was trying to kill myself. There’s a difference.’
The doctor asked whether she could try to explain what she felt the difference was between those two things.

‘Do you guys see different kinds of suicides?’

‘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’ve met types like that on wards. Poor-me-I-hate-me-punish-me-come-to-my-funeral. Then they show you a 20 X 25 glossy of their dead cat. It’s all self-pity bullshit. It’s bullshit. I didn’t have any special grudges. I didn’t fail an exam or get dumped by anybody. All these types. Hurt themselves.’

‘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.’

‘I wanted to just stop being conscious. I’m a whole different type. I wanted to stop feeling this way. If I could have just put myself in a really long coma I would have done that. Or given myself shock I would have done that. Instead.’

‘The last thing more I’d want is hurt. I just didn’t want to feel this way anymore. I don’t… I didn’t believe this feeling would ever go away. I don’t. I still don’t. I’d rather feel nothing than this.’

The way she suddenly shook her head was vehement, exasperated. ‘The feeling is why I want to. The feeling is the reason I want to die. I’m here because I want to die. That’s why I’m in a room without windows and with cages over the lightbulbs and no lock on the toilet door. Why they took my shoelaces and my belt. But I notice they don’t take away the feeling do they.’

The resumed study of the movement of her feet. ‘When people 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, and then it’s happening, too, the whole horrible time, it’s about to happen and also it’s happening, all at the same time.’

Kate Gompert finally took a real breath. ‘And then but no matter what I do it gets worse and worse, it’s there more and more, this filter drops down, and the feeling makes the fear of the feeling way worse, and after a couple weeks it’s there all the time, the feeling, and I’m totally inside it, I’m in it and everything has to pass through it to get in, and I don’t want to smoke any Bob, and I don’t want to work, or go out, or read, or watch TP, or go out, or stay in, or either do anything or not do anything, I don’t want anything except for the feeling to go away. But it doesn’t. Part of the feeling is being like willing to do anything to make it go away. Understand that. Anything. Do you understand? It’s not wanting to hurt myself it’s wanting to not hurt.’

**

(On Addiction)

That a little-mentioned paradox of Substance addiction is: that once you are sufficiently enslaved by a Substance to need to quit the Substance in order to save your life, the enslaving Substance has become so deeply important to you that you will all but lose your mind when it is taken away from you. Or that sometime after your Substance of choice has just been taken away from you in order to save your life, as you hunker down for required a.m. and P.M. prayers, you will find yourself beginning to pray to be allowed literally to lose your mind, to be able to wrap your mind in an old newspaper or something and leave it in an alley to shift for itself, without you.

That most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking. That the cute Boston AA term for addictive-type thinking is: Analysis-Paralysis. That cats will in fact get violent diarrhea if you feed them milk, contrary to the popular image of cats and milk. That it is simply more pleasant to be happy than to be pissed off. That 99% of compulsive thinkers’ thinking is about themselves; that 99% of this self-directed thinking consists of imagining and then getting ready for things that are going to happen to them; and then, weirdly, that if they stop to think about it, that 100% of the things they spend 99% of their time and energy imagining and trying to prepare for all the contingencies and consequences of are never good. Then that this connects interestingly with the early-sobriety urge to pray for the literal loss of one’s mind. In short that 99% of the head’s thinking activity consists of trying to scare the everliving shit out of itself.

**

and then you’re in serious trouble, very serious trouble, and you know it, finally, deadly serious trouble, because this Substance you thought was your one true friend, that you gave up all for, gladly, that for so long gave you relief from the pain of the Losses your love of that relief caused, your mother and lover and god and compadre, has finally removed its smily-face mask to reveal centerless eyes and a ravening maw, and canines down to here, it’s the Face In The Floor, the grinning root-white face of your worst nightmares, and the face is your own face in the mirror, now, it’s you, the Substance has devoured or replaced and become you, and the puke-, drool-and Substance-crusted T-shirt you’ve both worn for weeks now gets torn off and you stand there looking and in the root-white chest where your heart (given away to It) should be beating, in its exposed chest’s center and center-less eyes is just a lightless hole, more teeth, and a beckoning taloned hand dangling something irresistible, and now you see you’ve been had, screwed royal, stripped and fucked and tossed to the side like some stuffed toy to lie for all time in the posture you land in. You see now that It’s your enemy and your worst personal nightmare and the trouble It’s gotten you into is undeniable and you still can’t stop. Doing the Substance now is like attending Black Mass but you still can’t stop, even though the Substance no longer gets you high. You are, as they say, Finished. You cannot get drunk and you cannot get sober; you cannot get high and you cannot get straight. You are behind bars; you are in a cage and can see only bars in every direction. You are in the kind of a hell of a mess that either ends lives or turns them around.

**

“It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.”

**

For, you, if you attain your goal and cannot find some way to transcend the experience of having that goal be your entire existence, your raison de faire, so, then, one of two things we see will happen.’

‘One, one is that you attain the goal and realize the shocking realization that attaining the goal does not complete or redeem you, does not make everything for your life “OK” as you are, in the culture, educated to assume it will do this, the goal. And then you face this fact that what you had thought would have the meaning does not have the meaning when you get it, and you are impaled by shock. We see suicides in history by people at these pinnacles;

Consider Consciousness

or The Problem with Consciousness

Let’s begin with the premise that consciousness is a state of awareness, not just awareness but self-awareness. From the observation of other creatures and objects, it may be surmised that there are various gradations of consciousness ranging from none (e.g. stone, metal) to some (flora and fauna) to the consciousness as evidenced in human beings, presumably the highest form of consciousness. This idea can be visualized as concentric circles, the largest of which would represent all consciousness and the smallest, no consciousness. We make these judgments based on empirical observations and an inherent, internal logic by which we make common sense decisions. The theory of hermeneutics delves into this idea in more detail.

Having observed these states of consciousness and the possible gradations thereof, it may also be surmised that there are higher levels of consciousness, not achievable by man since he is encased in a physical body. That is, he is trapped in a particular time and space. Our conscious nature leads us to these ideas and conclusions and awakens a desire within us to seek after this supposed higher level of consciousness.

One may also surmise that life itself is a drive towards consciousness. However, life must be contained in the physical to achieve any sort of consciousness but once achieved, it tends towards higher and higher levels.

The conclusion, therefore, and problem, with this movement towards higher levels of consciousness is that it is cyclical in its very nature. The highest level of consciousness cannot be achieved until there is no physical form attached. But if there is no physical form, only consciousness, we can infer a universal consciousness in which all individual consciousnesses dissolve once free.

Ergo, a universal consciousness can only exist at the cost of the individual consciousness. Assuming the above conclusions are accurate, once universal consciousness is achieved, consciousness is in effect destroyed since the conscious self no longer exists.

To be conscious (as far as we know) is to have a self or the idea of a self, an I. Once we lose ourselves, we join the universal consciousness, which (as far as we can surmise) does not have a self. It is all the selves that ever were and ever will be. Once the self is lost, the universal consciousness again strives for individual consciousness, which again results in life and the process recurs. Since it is cyclical, there is no end and no beginning. Time and space do not exist in this case, which also lead us to infer that everything can occur simultaneously. Therefore, assuming that the universal consciousness is what is meant by God, God wants us to have a self, that is, become self-aware.

This idea is summed up by David Foster Wallace when he writes, “You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place.” That is, consciousness seeks to transcend the limits that make consciousness possible in the first place. Hence, the problem with consciousness.

Wallace presents this idea in another way, stating, “the universe [is] an infinite system of neural connections that had evolved, at it’s highest point, an organism that could sustain consciousness of both itself and the universe at the same time, such that the human nervous system became the universe’s way of being aware of and thus accessible to itself.”

In this sense, the drive towards truth, which is to say, consciousness or self-awareness, this insistent desire for knowledge, is “God”-given. Seeking the answers to existence itself as such is not only the goal of philosophy, but of the universe itself.