Something to Do with Being Human

Thanksgiving in Virginia was exceedingly gray this year. A flat gray with no rain, my least favorite kind of weather. It’s terrible watching that sky from the window of a comfortable room. It gives you nothing. I took my dog for a walk and was grateful for the cold. I had to work to get back to comfortable. I think gray days are unsettling because they don’t give me a scene to set myself in. There is no action, just me and time, which itself is imperceptible for most of the day given the general flatness of lighting. And when it’s just me looking at me in a gray scene, I don’t seem all that important.

The Wednesday prior to Thanksgiving I received in the mail a novella by David Foster Wallace: Something to Do with Paying Attention. I read all 136 pages within the next 48 hours. It starts with someone answering an interview question. They are having a hard time remembering the answer. They seem to work a tedious job. They don’t reminisce very often. Wallace gets me by the eighth sentence:

“If I drank, for instance, some Tang, it wouldn’t remind me of anything—I’d just taste the Tang.”

Something to Do with Paying Attention was a part of Wallace’s longer, unfinished work The Pale King (which, admittedly, I haven’t read but now want to read). He considered publishing the novella on its own before his death in 2008. The Tang-drinking interviewee is an IRS employee. He remains unnamed, but we know from The Pale King that he’s called Chris Fogle, more specifically, “Irrelevant Chris Fogel.”

“From what I understand, I’m supposed to explain how I arrived at this career. Where I came from, so to speak, and what the Service means to me.”

The novella is a conversion narrative. Chris starts with generalities about his old drifter attitude, calling himself “pretty much of a wastoid.” The memories take on more certainty as he describes his hippie-era clothing, family disfunctions, ritualistic procrastination tendencies, and overall nihilism. The recollection centers on three events. His recreational use of a drug called Obetrol, the grotesque death of his father, and an accidental encounter with a substitute Jesuit professor teaching the final review lesson in an Advanced Tax class.

“Orbetrolling didn’t make me self-conscious. But it did make me much more self-aware. If I was in a room, and had taken an Orbetrol or two with a glass of water and they’d taken effect, I was now not only in the room, but I was aware that I was in the room. In fact, I remember I would often think, or say to myself, quietly but very clearly, ‘I am in this room.’”

Chris calls this effect “doubling,” and it boils down to having perfect control over one’s attention. You could listen to music, enjoy the music, feel relaxed by the music, and also know you are listening to music in a room on the fifth floor of an apartment in Chicago on a cold day in February while you should be doing your readings: “It wasn’t like the normal thing with recreational drugs which made colors brighter or music more intense. What became more intense was my awareness of my own part in it, that I could pay real attention to it.”

Sounds a lot like “This is Water.” But Chris isn’t interested in directing his new freedom of thought towards intentional compassion. He’s just fascinated and sometimes overwhelmed. Reality is the hook. His ordinary wastoidism looks cool because it seems like he’s seen through all the restrictive constructions and outdated meaning in society. He’s progressed beyond that into sincere nihilism. But it’s an act, an attitude he puts on and, even worse, one he puts on without realizing it. Obetrol strips this all away. It’s just Chris and the question of what to do about being human.

Dissociation is a word that got thrown around a lot in my high school once we were seniors. In retrospect, it seems like an ordinary adolescent experience—at least the way we defined it. Imagine it’s evening and you’re on a bus heading home from a game. Whatever bus you just imagined is probably very familiar, so familiar it’s just scenery. You’re bumping along, occasionally listening to conversation or thinking about something forgettable. Someone says your name, shows you a picture, laughs. They turn to someone else. Suddenly, incredibly, the bus becomes strange. The bus, and the road, and the buildings passing behind into night become altogether more than scenery. They are events of the most immediate kind. They show stern faces and make mute demands on your attention. The being there of things is urgent and you have no answer for it.

How do you face a Thanksgiving table in this intensity? The world gets too still on a gray day and the sweet potato starts asking why it is.

“In the final analysis, the accident was no one’s fault. I was there when it happened—the accident—and there is no denying that it was one hundred percent terrible.”

Chris’s father is a type-A character, tightly restrained, intelligent, and humming with intensity. He also works in the financial world. As you would imagine, Chris’s father doesn’t like to be late. The wastoid young-adult Chris makes his father late one December afternoon during the Christmas shopping rush. I won’t spoil the whole story, but this lateness, the father’s type-A tendencies, and a public transportation system collide rather tragically.

Chris’s father is so in the world. “My father, on the other hand, I know, remembered everything—in particular, physical details, the precise day and time of appointments, and past statements which were now inconsistent with present statements.” How would it feel to draw your father out of that precise, attentive reality for just long enough to get him killed? The guilt is almost implied. But the legal system Chris encounters in the aftermath of the accident falls into technical minutia, endlessly interconnected webs of liability, mind-numbing complexity. Chris’s mother calls off the case. The lawyers, however, won’t leave her alone. They sue her for a disagreement over their payment during the first suit. Justice boils down to accounting. What was alive and now isn’t are issues wholly set apart.

Turkey. Stuffing. Cranberry sauce. I made my choices from the laid table. There was a limit to how much I could fit before I was full. I had three tenths of what was there. I counted it.

“‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘—by which I mean, of course, latter adolescents who aspire to manhood—gentlemen, here is the truth: Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is. Such endurance is, as it happens, the distillate of what is, today, in this world neither I nor you have made, heroism. Heroism.’”

I copied the above quote into my journal while I was reading. It comes from a speech given by the substitute teacher of Advanced Tax on the final day of classes. Many of the students are older and aspire to become accountants in the IRS soon. The substitute (who, as it turns out, may not be a Jesuit priest at all, but an IRS employee himself) gives them an exhortation, preparing them for the final steps towards a life in “the Service.”

I was initially inclined to be encouraged myself. By then I just wanted wastoid Chris to get his life together. And what is the modern world if not endlessly complex. Millions of data points flood servers, systems, and desks meant to organize, calculate, analyze, project, keep account. Think of buying groceries with a credit card. Think of how the store gets paid, how the bank keeps track of your debt, how the bank itself is constantly borrowing and sharing money with other banks, how those debts are tracked and paid. This is the reality moving constantly below our field of vision. Who holds up our world but the accountant? What, but the spreadsheet, is our book of order? And if we can read this book, if we can attend to these numbers, wouldn’t that be the Truth?

My religious language is intentionally overt. Wallace’s language is the same. But read this again—I don’t like the fruits of this new faith: “It may be that this kind of work changes you. Even just rote exams. It might actually change your brain. For the most part, it’s now almost as if I’m trapped in the present. If I drank, for instance, some Tang, it wouldn’t remind me of anything—I’d just taste the Tang.”

Dissociating and doubling are not the same. With the former you find yourself counting bread, potatoes, corn and so on, but you can’t taste them. You’re pulled too far back. You’re stretched over too big a moment. You’re as out of the present as possible. But being in the moment and doubling are not the same either. You could get pressed so close to reality that it’s all just scenery. It’s all equally acceptable data. It’s all facts requiring no further justification.

I won’t be Orbetrolling, and I don’t recommend it to anyone else. Is doubling the goal anyway—seeing everything, and feeling it, and knowing that it’s there, and knowing that I’m there, all at the same time? There’s still the question of what the being there means and what to do about it.

It’s gray, and it’s flat, and it’s dim. It’s gray, flat, dim, quiet, and temperate, and I’m looking at all that gray, flat, dimness, while it’s quiet and temperate. And I’m feeling kind of gray myself, sitting in this temperate, quiet room, looking at a gray, flat, dim sky outside, which could rain but doesn’t and instead looks like a totally impervious wall through which absolutely no sun or moon or other celestial body can be seen. And generally, the gray flat dimness of it all is making it rather difficult for me to feel important or basically meaningful. And while that question of everything having meaning is continually magnified by the ongoing grayness outside, it seems correspondingly to be answered in the negative by the general banality of the day. But, at the same time, the very magnification of the question, and the fact that its intense current urgency originates from an exterior landscape, as though that scenery, gray clouds and all, was itself demanding from me personally that I address this question with the almost revelatory or transcendent sense of reality telling me something, all of this seems to imply an affirmative answer to the question. And so on and so forth, and it really is a very gray, gray day.

Am I paying enough attention?

Image Credit: Jasper F. Cropsey, “Gray Day on the Esopus” (1882) via Cleveland Museum of Art.