Celebrities - just like us

I find that I'm responding to the death of David Foster Wallace (who hung himself last September) much as I did to that of Kurt Cobain. I wasn't more than superficially familiar with either man or the work thereof before his death - my reaction has been much more of my mind than my gut. Cobain showed me that a person could be living his (my) dream - making a living doing the thing he loved to do, receiving critical and popular acclaim for doing so, maintaining a home in a beautiful city, and creating a family with a woman he loved - and it still might not be enough to quiet the hateful voices in his head. Limitless alcohol and heroin might not be enough. For him, the only way to silence the voices was to extinguish himself.

Kurt Cobain taught me that living the dream did not mean you'd have peace of mind; that having it all was not the same thing as having enough. When Cobain died, I was well into active addiction and I didn't really put it all together until after I got clean. I just knew his death commanded my attention.

In David Foster Wallace I see the me that has fought the good fight - gone through year after year of treatment for the depression that required multiple trials with various pharmaceutical cocktails before achieving some relief. My illness has been called "medically resistant" and ever since reading Undercurrents I have wondered if I should ask about the ECT Wallace submitted himself to. He lived my back-up dream - writer, college professor, spouse - and survived well into middle-age before whatever it is inside us became too much to beat back.

I'm not sure what I'll ultimately take away from Wallace's life and death. My audience is certainly not as demanding as his; my life is the result of not making promises I was afraid I wouldn't be able to keep. I'm not a high-energy person to begin with and I deliberately conserve strength to fight my disease(s) - is that the best I'll ever be able to do?

This, I Believe

“The difference between us is that I have a basis for condemning evil in its Christian guise. You have no basis for confronting evil in its atheist guise, or in its Christian guise, either. When you say that a certain practice is evil, you have to be prepared to tell us why it is evil. And this brings us to the last point—you make the first glimmer of an attempt to provide a basis for ethics. You say in passing that ethical imperatives are “derived from innate human solidarity.” A host of difficult questions immediately arise, which is perhaps why atheists are generally so coy about trying to answer this question. Derived by whom? Is this derivation authoritative? Do the rest of us ever get to vote on which derivations represent true, innate human solidarity? Do we ever get to vote on the authorized derivers? On what basis is innate human solidarity authoritative? If someone rejects innate human solidarity, are they being evil, or are they just a mutation in the inevitable changes that the evolutionary process requires? What is the precise nature of human solidarity? What is easier to read, the book of Romans or innate human solidarity? Are there different denominations that read the book of innate human solidarity differently? Which one is right? Who says? And last, does innate human solidarity believe in God?”

“There are three insurmountable problems for you here. The first is that innate is not a synonym for authoritative. Why does anyone have to obey any particular prompting from within? And which internal prompting is in charge of sorting out all the other competing promptings? Why? Second, the tangled skein of innate and conflicting moralities found within the billions of humans alive today also has to be sorted out and systematized. Why do you get to do it and then come around and tell us how we must behave? Who died and left you king? And third, according to you, this innate morality of ours is found in a creature (mankind) that is a distant blood cousin of various bacteria, aquatic mammals, and colorful birds in the jungle. Your entire worldview has evolution as a key foundation stone, and evolution means nothing if not change. You believe that virtually every species has morphed out of another one. And when we change, as we must, all our innate morality changes with us, right? We have distant cousins where the mothers ate their young. Was that innate for them? Did they evolve out of it because it was evil for them to be doing that?”

- theologian Douglas Wilson, from a debate with Christopher Hitchens.

I agree with him, and yet don’t end up the same place Douglas Wilson does (unless of course we’re speaking of Doug Wilson from Weeds and went back in time 15 years [at which point there was no Weeds] in which case I’d always be the same place as Doug Wilson; that is, stoned out of my mind).

/tangent

I understand that I have no justifiable basis for my ethics. I do not believe in an independent standard against which my actions are measured. I don’t believe in a place of agreement we would all get to if we just sat still long enough, despite my recent immersion in Buddhist literature.

This is the great abyss of existentialism. This is the “fear unto death”. This is what keeps me awake on those nights when the fact of my own mortality bears down on me like a semi.

There is no magnetic north with which I can align when constructing my moral compass. I choose compassion and kindness (I don’t always live either one) knowing full well that I will be run over by those that don’t. The only reward I hope for for doing so is peace of mind, without which nothing else (in my experience) matters.

I guess the assumption I start with is that your existence is as important to you as mine is to me. I make judgments about who is capable of comprehending their own limited nature and act in ways I hope reduce suffering for all.

Everyone’s motivations and beliefs are based on certain assumptions. The source of all the conflict is that we don’t all start from the same ones.