Someone once called irony the song of a bird that has come to love its cage and even though it sings about not liking the cage, it really likes it in there.
DFW in an interview.
Going through what I daren’t call my archives for fear of offending archivists if they could see the anarchic piles of random shit I can’t bear to throw out, piled on top of each other, in and out of boxes, and boxes in boxes — analogue and digital, came across this lovely piece by Maria Bustillos probably from the New Yorker, which, if you love DFW (and I know plenty of people don’t, but you know what? fuck you…) is replete with riches. (She even articulates why people love him, because like no other, he “gave voice to the inner workings of ordinary human beings” although that should be human being singular, because the only inner working you can know are your own, they were always his own inner workings, albeit in disguise, or what they could have been, or would have been if…)
The writer recalls meeting up with a friend, C., a fellow-admirer of Wallace, who has suffered from depression for many years.
In New York some weeks after Wallace’s death, a catastrophe that had hit the both of us like a couple of bricks to the head. We had a good late lunch and afterward on that cold, blowy, fast-darkening late afternoon we sat on freezing stone steps on a quiet corner and snuggled together and talked about Wallace for a while. I mentioned that I could not understand how anyone would want to commit suicide, not right then, not with this historic presidential election right around the corner; how could you not want to stick around and find out what happens?
Americans always think their presidential elections, every single one, is historic. And it always turns out not to be, except for the one in 2024 — but that as an aside. The one she refers to was the election of Obama, another devout Christian with a lot of teeth albeit with a slightly different colour skin, who did nothing for 8 years, although as we were to find out a decade or two later, doing nothing is not necessarily a bad thing for an American president. But anyhoo, then comes what is quite literally the punchline :
C. looked at me with pity and sadness, as if from a great distance, and said, “Oh, honey. You don’t care. You don’t care; that’s the whole point.”
Yes. The depressed person finds themselves unable to care, about the world and themselves and others. And care is the whole point of life and living, of being — even an old Nazi philosopher could see that — and no longer wanting to live, is lacking the ability, the capacity to care.
Bustillos writes with great sensitivity and compassiona about people with depression :
I have known intimately and looked after depressed people, and have no illusions about my ability to understand the real nature of that illness. The sort of blues I occasionally suffer through compares to real depression like a broken fingernail compares to being shot in the head and then set on fire and drowned. But it seems to me that the victims of that terrible disorder are often trying all their lives in vain to figure out why this must be so. Why them. And maybe there really is just no reason, or the reason is completely random, a cluster of neurons misfiring one day by accident, a bad thing that happens and could not be helped.
I’ll tell you why : if you get cancer it doesn’t matter if you understand it or not, but depression is different, if you figure out why it may release you from it. Finding out why is the panacea, it is your salvation, your redemption, and sometimes it feels so agonisingly close.
I think perhaps that is why the many and varied anti-depressant drugs work for some people and not for others. If I believe that my depression is no more than a simple chemical imbalance, a shortage in my brain through no fault of my own or of others, of some essential hormone or neuro-transmitter, which can be fixed with a pill, then I feel a whole lot better. And who is to say I am not in fact a whole lot better. Unfortunately for me every single one of the half a dozen or so different ones I’ve tried, even in the lowest possible dosage, even opening the capsule and taking out one or two of the tiny little beads and swallowing them, gives me as David (or his mother Sally!) might have said, the howling fantods.