#infinite jest

…the paralytic stasis that results from the obsessive analysis of all possible implications of both getting up from the couch and not getting up from the couch…

Wallace, David Foster (2009-04-03). Infinite Jest (p. 503). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.

…talent is sort of a dark gift, that talent is its own expectation: it is there from the start and either lived up to or lost.

Schtitt’s thrust, and his one great irresistible attraction in the eyes of Mario’s late father: The true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player himself. Always and only the self out there, on court, to be met, fought, brought to the table to hammer out terms. The competing boy on the net’s other side: he is not the foe: he is more the partner in the dance. He is the what is the word excuseoroccasion for meeting the self. As you are his occasion. Tennis’s beauty’s infinite roots are self-competitive. You compete with your own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution. Disappear inside the game: break through limits: transcend: improve: win. Which is why tennis is an essentially tragic enterprise, to improve and grow as a serious junior, with ambitions. You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again.

Wallace, David Foster (2009-04-03). Infinite Jest (p. 84). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.

‘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.” ’ She was back to looking intently at her lower carpopedals. ‘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.’

Wallace, David Foster (2009-04-03). Infinite Jest (p. 74). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.

ph. Darren Ankenman

YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

[…] [DFW, Infinite Jest, 14c]

Katherine Gompert seemed to come out of her dark reverie for a moment. She stared full-frontal at the doctor for several seconds, and the doctor, who’d had all discomfort at being stared at by patients trained right out of him when he’d rotated through the paralysis/-plegia wards upstairs, was able to look directly back at her with a kind of bland compassion, the expression of someone who was compassionate but was not, of course, feeling what she was feeling, and who honored her subjective feelings by not even trying to pretend that he was. Sharing them. The young woman’s expression, in turn, revealed that she had decided to take what amounted for her to her own gamble, this early in a therapeutic relationship. The abstract resolve on her face now duplicated what had been on the doctor’s face when he’d taken the gamble of asking her to sit up straight.
‘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.” ’ She was back to looking intently at her lower carpopedals. '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.’
The doctor wrote down something much too brief to correspond directly to what she’d said. He was nodding both while he wrote and when he looked up. 'And yet this nauseated feeling has come and gone for you in the past, it’s passed eventually during prior depressions, Katherine, has it not?’
'But when you’re in the feeling you forget. The feeling feels like it’s always been there and will always be there, and you forget. It’s like this whole filter drops down over the whole way you think about everything, a couple weeks after —’
They sat and looked at each other. The doctor felt some combination of intense clinical excitement and anxiety about perhaps saying the wrong thing at such a crucial juncture and fouling up. His last name was needle-pointed in yellow braid on the left breast of the white coat he was required to wear. 'I’m sorry? A couple weeks after— ?’
He waited for seven breaths.
'I want shock,’ she said finally. 'Isn’t part of this whole concerned kindness deal that you’re supposed to ask me how I think you can be of help? Cause I’ve been through this before. You haven’t asked what I want. Isn’t it? Well how about either give me ECT [29] again, or give me my belt back. Because I can’t stand feeling like this another second, and the seconds keep coming on and on.’
'Well,’ the doctor said slowly, nodding to indicate he had heard the feelings the young woman was expressing, 'Well, I’m happy to discuss treatment options with you, Katherine. But I have to say right now I’m curious about what you started it sounded like to me to maybe start to indicate what might have occurred, something, two weeks ago to make you feel these feelings now. Would you be comfortable talking to me about it?’
'Either ECT or you could just sedate me for a month. You could do that. All I’d need is I think a month at the outside. Like a controlled coma. You could do that, if you guys want to help.’
The doctor gazed at her with a patience she was meant to see.
And she gave him back a frightening smile, a smile empty of all affect, as if someone had contracted her circumorals with a thigmotactic electrode. The teeth of the smile evidenced a clinical depressive’s classic inattention to oral hygiene.
She said 'I was thinking I was about to say you’ll think I’m crazy if I tell you. But then I remembered where I am.’ She made a small sound that was supposed to be laughter; it did sound jagged, dentate.
'I was going to say I’ve thought sometimes before like the feeling maybe had to do with Hope.’
'Hope.’
Her arms had been crossed over her breasts the whole time, and though the room was overheated the patient rubbed each palm continually over her upper arms, behavior one associates with chill. The position and movement shielded her inner arms from view. The doctor’s eyebrows had gone synclinal from puzzlement without his awareness.
'Bob.’
'Bob.’ The doctor was anxious that his failure to have any idea what the girl was referring to would betray itself and accentuate her feelings of loneliness and psychic pain. Classic unipolars were usually tormented by the conviction that no one else could hear or understand them when they tried to communicate. Hence jokes, sarcasm, the psychopathology of unconscious arm-rubbing.
Kate Gompert’s head was rolling like a blind person’s. 'Jesus what am I doing here. Bob Hope. Dope. Sinse. Stick. Grass. Smoke.’ She made a quick duBois-gesture with thumb and finger held to rounded lips. The dealers down where I buy it some of them make you call it Bob Hope when you call, in case anybody’s accessed the line. You’re supposed to ask is Bob in town. And if they have some they say “Hope springs eternal,” usually. It’s like a code. One kid makes you ask him to please commit a crime. The dealers that stay around any length of time tend to be on the paranoid side. As if it would fool anybody who knew enough to
bother to access the band on the call.’ She seemed decidedly more animated. 'And one particular guy with snakes in a tank in a trailer in Allston, he —’
'So drugs, then, you’re saying you feel may be a factor,’ the doctor interrupted.
The depressed young woman’s face emptied once more. She engaged briefly in something the staffers on Specials called the Thousand-Meter Stare.
'Not “drugs,” ’ she said slowly. The doctor smelled shame in the room, sour and uremic. Her face had become distantly pained now.
The girl said: 'Stopping.’
The doctor felt comfortable saying once again that he was not sure he understood what she was trying to share with him.
She now went through a series of expressions that made it clinically impossible for the doctor to determine whether or not she was entirely sincere. She looked either pained or trying somehow to suppress hilarity. She said 'I don’t know if you’ll believe me. I’m worried you’ll think I’m crazy. I have this thing with pot.’
'Meaning marijuana.’

[…] [DFW, Infinite Jest, 14d]

YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

[…] [DFW, Infinite Jest, 14b]

‘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.’ Still that intriguing, unsettling combination of blank facial masking and conventionally animated vocal tone. The doctor’s small nods were designed to appear not as responses but as invitations to continue, what Dretske called Momentumizers.
'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.’
'Play,’ nodding in confirmation, making small quick notes.
'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 doctor was writing with great industry.
'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 doctor’s eyes appeared keenly interested in an abstract way. They looked severely magnified behind his attractive but thick glasses, the frames of which were steel. Patients on other floors during other rotations had sometimes complained that they sometimes felt like something in a jar he was studying intently through all that thick glass. He was saying 'This feeling of wanting to stop feeling by dying, then, is —’
The way she suddenly shook her head was vehement, exasperated. 'The feeling is why I want to. The feeling is thereason 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.’ 
'Is the feeling you’re explaining something you’ve experienced in your other depressions, then, Katherine?’
The patient didn’t respond right away. She slid her foot out of her shoes and touched one bare foot with the toes of the other foot. Her eyes tracked this activity. The conversation seemed to have helped her focus. Like most clinically depressed patients, she appeared to function better in focused activity than in stasis. Their normal paralyzed stasis allowed these patients’ own minds to chew them apart. But it was always a titanic struggle to get them to do anything to help them focus. Most residents found the fifth floor a depressing place to do a rotation.
'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.’
The doctor clicked his pen slowly a few times and explained that he’s more interested here in what shewould choose to call the feeling, since it was her feeling.
The resumed study of the movement of her feet. 'When people call it that I always get pissed off because I always think depressionsounds 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.’ She seemed to the doctor decidedly more animated now, even as she seemed unable to meet his eyes. Her respiration had sped back up. The doctor recalled classic hyperventilatory episodes being characterized by carpopedal spasms, and reminded himself to monitor the patient’s hands and feet carefully during the interview for any signs of tetanic contraction, in which case the prescribed therapy would be I.V. calcium in a saline percentage he would need quickly to look up.
'Wellthis’ — 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.’
'So you’d say anxiety is a big part of your depressions.’
It was now not clear whether she was responding to the doctor or not. 'Everything gets horrible. Everything you see gets ugly. Luridis the word. Doctor Carton said lurid, one time. That’s the right word for it. And everything sounds harsh, spiny and harsh-sounding, like every sound you hear all of a sudden has teeth. And smelling like I smell bad even after I just got out of the shower. It’s like what’s the point of washing if everything smells like I need another shower.’
The doctor looked intrigued rather than concerned for a moment as he wrote all this down. He preferred handwritten notes to a laptop because he felt M.D.s who typed into their laps during clinical interviews gave a cold impression.
Kate Gompert’s face writhed for a moment while the doctor was writing. 'I fear this feeling more than I fear anything, man. More than pain, or my mom dying, or environmental toxicity. Anything.’
'Fear is a major part of anxiety,’ the doctor confirmed.

[…] [DFW, Infinite Jest, 14c]

blueink3:

blueink3:

remind me never to embark on a three-part magnum opus right as work is ramping up ever, ever again. 

Over 18k and delusional author still has high hopes of proofing and posting today. Lol.

come hell or high water, this chapter will be posted tonight. all 19k words of it. 

Some devoted fans with lots of time on their hands recreated Infinite Jest out of Legos. What have you done today?

-Hal-