To Insist on the Ordinary: Chapter 22 of _The Pale King_

I don't know if it is the best thing I've ever read, but there are only a handful of things I have put down and felt "that was the best thing I have ever read." And today, reading Chapter 22 of _The Pale King_, was one of them. I have never been sad that a single chapter in the middle of a book ended before, until today. And I don't know quite yet if the nameless character is going to make an appearance outside of the 98 page chapter, and it doesn't really matter. It's its own thing, and reads as if it is coming from a very detailed case study in, say, _The Varieties of Religious Experience_. I mean, that may be a really biased comparison for a William James fanatic such as myself, but in my defense, James is referenced. He shows up in the story when one of his essays is quoted on a transparency sheet by the tax accounting lector that brings about the character's great change. The quote, dealing with the heretofore ignored proposal James made in the early 1900s for a "moral equivalency of war," in which people of drafting age, rather than be eligible for an entity that purports imperialism and destruction, are selected for a morally positive service program that would serve to improve communities domestically and abroad. I read this proposal a year ago with great enthusiasm, wishing for some sort of alternate life path in which I was directed toward a task out of college or high school that embedded somehow some sense of appreciation and duty in my thick (I'll say it again) thick noggin.

On further thought, I realized how many would write this off to be such a waste of the "get ahead" years. What we, as either diligent or lazy students with the same degree, "have worked so hard for." The chance to hit the big-boy/girl workforce and start forcing our lion's will on this stupidly structured civilization. Stupid until I got there. Before WE did, though when I said WE I'm sure I meant I again. What a colossal disappointment when my release upon the world did not go down as such. In all honesty, I would have felt it highway robbery had my right to choose what I did at this age been taken (which was wander the depths of disappointing employment opportunities), and so foreign would have been the concept of something that could impart a sense of responsibility and duty. How little did I want experience in doing something good for communities outside of a profit or prestige motive. And also, how miserable was I. The James quote, shown to a class full of would-be accountants whom the lector proceeds to call the real kind of heroes, is attributed with just the word James at the end. The narrator confuses the name for some sort of biblical guy, and little does he know that such a program would have gone such a long way toward righting his fuzzy dilemma of unintentional nihilism. I mean, it wasn't so much him not wanting to know how to go about personal fulfillment and actualization of a mature life, it's more a matter of not having a clue how that looks. And as a reaction, the only thing he knew was how to shrink back in to what he knew. More college lifestyle bullshit. Joining in on the escape parade, who adults and peers alike, all seem to agree now that that's what college is FOR. As if college has now become this pricey Amish rumspringa more so than a place for higher learning. Gross.

The story's delivery never goes outside the boundaries of the narrator's subjectivity, giving it an engaging and almost too-easy disclosure for us readers. The experience of this man is effortlessly transmitted. For a while I was imagining the situational set up as an interview for an article, maybe a counseling appointment given DFW's past tendencies, then maybe a testimonial as props for working at the IRS--and then the story became too vivid to care much about it. It felt like a spoon-fed, but still stimulating, documentary, in the way of Chris Smith's _The Collapse_ or an Errol Morris piece. Simply a person talking at a camera with no impediment from outside forces. We hear exactly what the subject thinks and feels. It can be so convincing. The tale is a look back on the past, and so is an air-tight construction of relevant circumstances and details. There are no shooting-from-the-hip kinds of meanings based on the messy unfolding of people interacting. The outcomes and meanings are given straight. They exist well before, and the story is clearly working towards them. It is deliberate in trying to put a solution on this, well, slight issue that I feel so deep as a young adult. This thing that is finally starting to clear up and look manageable. The solution to work. How can one work and not grow into something he doesn't imagine he'll like? How does repetition of task provide fulfillment for the "unlucky" of those condemned to the ordinary life? How in the fuck are all the expectations and imaginings of the fantasizing college kid engrossed in the finer things (whether unsustainable partying and eating out, or speculating days away on Lord Byron and Darwin), who naturally tends to think this is what moving out from home looks like, to be reconciled with bottom lines produced from rigid structure and task? Lots of effort revolving around respect for the one thing we all have learned to have a basic disrespect for--money. You give me a humanities student who doesn't tell you otherwise about the cause of all ills. It's the easy place to go.

It may be a middle-class dilemma--so not boo-hoo in the same way as starvation or genocide, but by god it is real. Sure, many of the kids at my particularly expensive school could afford to maintain such a lifestyle out of school--work the internship, grease the family wheels, and receive parental direction on how to stay in their particular echelon of society. Some actually got responsibility early on. Then there was the type like me--huge amounts of sacrifice on the family's part, a sort of idea that it would lead to something that would "work itself out," and a child who just didn't see how life applied to him because he could write smart essays about Dusan Makavejev or something. The rest go to grad school, where the bad news awaits them a few years later. I say it reminds me of Smith and Morris' films, specifically, because it walks the devoted path of the portrait of a person who responds oddly to living a most ordinary and utilitarian professional life. Something that over my privileged film-watching years, seemed like the most amazing subject to me. The serious artistic approach in finding creativity, joy, and happiness in the ordinary realm. It seemed downright exotic. Finding magic outside of the bright lights. It's more comfortable to feel IRS agents don't have amazing stories, isn't it? Like our heads would explode if we could investigate in detail every story behind every man sitting in every cubicle. My little radical self wanted to go THERE. My actual self got beaten in the head with the actual playing out of the struggles in middle-class existence. Like imagining the shiny scales and fire breathing and the grand size of the dragon, and then physically stumbling upon it one day. How pretty the details of the beast didn't seem to come to mind when confronted with it. Nonetheless, I stuck with the art of guys like Chris Smith, Morris, Cassavetes, Mike Leigh, some others, and they have been extremely helpful tools in showing me how to appreciate much that is rich about a life when all the rules apply. I have started to sink in and look it in the eyes and then surrender to it and now I like people and small gestures and keeping a house clean and cooking cheap and showing up for responsibilities and some days my whole life DANCES--and it struggles too.

The chapter goes into great detail at what is called the "priming" experiences that a now lucid ex-waistoid (an aimless young male in the woe-is-me throes of a consumption-based life in the 70's America Midwest) goes through to build up to the religious experience. The results of said experience, I think, is the boy's motivation to wrestle himself to a middle-ground state of mind, and to plunge into the call of duty at the IRS recruitment center based on an overwhelming sense of needing purpose and utility in his life. True surrender leading to leaving himself behind. The onslaught of clarity comes after the narrator accidentally stumbles into an Advanced Tax final review at something like the third or fourth college he has wandered in and out of up to this point in his life. After going through some recent family trauma, he is starting to, um, let's just say, wonder about life rather than passively accept the insipid existence of not knowing what in the hell the point is. His ears are open for something different. I say um, because it is a dreadful kind of wonder. Heavy angst. Ugly awareness and recognition of a life with eyes for no meaning. He heretofore behaves as a boy who is not trying to be anything because he doesn't want to be, but his life choices make it clear that he is sort of still trying to be something that resembles what he thinks he is supposed to be. Mostly these things are revealed by his consumer choices. Unfortunately for him, just a tinge of the bigger perspective creeps in. The perspective is somewhat artificially induced as well. Picking up on an oddball drug of choice, his new-mind is developed over a period of time in which he starts popping an upper called Obetrol, that heightens not only his senses in what he's doing, but causes a "doubling" effect that allows him to be aware of what he is actually doing and what the "world" sees him doing. Maybe that "world" is like a judgmental father or surveillance camera, maybe it is like a loving God that is helping him wake up and use his life. It is hard to say, but the awareness starts to work the character toward an inability to remain comfortable with the waistoid kinds of things he keeps on doing. He knows he pisses off his dad, concerns his mother, is old friends of shame, is often not comfortable in his own skin, etc., but as he gets older, an intolerance for this starts to seep into his psyche. He basically starts to know that the dread is the result of his own making. It is him that is being lazy and not putting a strong foot forward. And he can less and less adopt the "funny and cool" coping mechanism his peers use to justify said shitty behavior. The awareness is slow, insidious, and habit-forming. It doesn't exactly help him immediately, but more traps him deeper into angst. Rather than change his behavior, it feeds guilt and shame. It is good to discover that a life with no responsibility or purpose does not feel good, right? And that pissing off people does not either? And that instead of being an incredibly boring sell-out, that his dad has honor and is an interesting man? And that there are flaws in his mother's unconditional defense of his shortcomings? Slowly seeping "nopes" start to infiltrate his rationalizations, and it doesn't feel good.

It is infuriating because it unfolds so accurately to those in the throes of an existence with inexhaustible options for comfort and quick-fix sustenance. Naivte gets unraveled, and fuck, now what? The new awareness makes the only solace he had stop working. The spiral-down starts to bottom out when, after given-up on weekday after weekday on the couch, slouching with a spinning soccer ball and taking in soap-operas, he finally hears "You are watching 'As The World Turns'" in a new and more literal meaning--the truly haunting one. And not even on his drug of choice, which would normally have helped him really hear "You are watching 'As the World Turns.'" But instead, it's this transitioning and aware person hearing it. It is sober--in the serious sense of the word. Like one who may have done psychedelics a handful of times, then recognizes the nature of their ceiling, and merely draws on a relevant tripping insight from the past rather than taking more to get "the answer." The alternative being that fifty year old dude popping tabs of E or windowpane and looking to "feel new ways, man." It's like these adult reflections appeared before him, and said to the slightly younger him: "Really think about this, which one of us do you really want to be?" And one of the adult images looked basically like a healthy him and the other one was bald with a pony-tail.

The story seemingly gets told five or six years after said religious experience, and there is a firm "that was then" tone to it, and an inferred "now it's all better." So what happened then? All the details of his whole existence to this point are reduced to become the dreadful and funny and necessary ingredients for the thing that would that day make his life make sense--the phenomenal event. The narrator persists in mentioning the small moments at which the awareness of his ugly behaviors take root. They are small thoughts, such as Mom and Dad worked really hard for that table and I didn't respect its condition. Dad was the dolt who always read books--wait, that is kind of interesting. Looking back, these are the thoughts that have come to carry the most gravity after his decision to join the Service. That one moment of decision led to a clarity of actualizing himself away from the unconcerned version of him--growing up up and away. The building of awareness is not anything the character felt he had any control of over the time, and perhaps it would have been more pleasant not to have them, but again, that damn adult guy in the mirror shows up, and asks, "But come on now, which one of us do you REALLY want to be?" Up to now he had known somewhat practical short-term solutions to a sense of dread. They resemble small annoyances like justifying why to be miffed at a guy he lived with, who really just did the same types of things, or wearing fashionable clothing with little thought of he liked them. The little things end in grand ideas of a desperate "How do I be?" so such persnickety bullshit doesn't surface again. He goes and buys suits. He cares less about finding comfort or making excuses than just making sure his modest goals somehow happen. His views of life up to the decision are called out for what they are--insufficient. His new views are realistic and accompanied by a feeling of satiation.

An interesting point is that his actions don't seem to be motivated by getting laid or making money as much as they are by just not knowing what else to do. There is little purpose. It's not like a dilemma of sexual repression or what some other behavioral cogno-whathaveyou might try to sell. The real vice is the path of the least immediate resistance. Or fear of leaving what is safe. There is no talk about his desires for women, or impressing them by being cool or fitting in. Just a guy trying to feel ok by matching his surroundings, and half-assing how to be what he has a tiny idea about what he's supposed to be. And picking up a few pony tricks along the way. The residue of this way of life builds and builds and builds into an eventual bundle of cells he cannot stand. My stomach spent most of the reading in the pits--like I was finally coming to terms with how naive and grossly inaccurate my twenties were. What I remember from them is feeling really smart for the first half of them--like, all the time. But in a really foggy way. Later, like failure was an understatement. Like a shame factory. I tasted remorse most weekends, and kept trying to pretend away from it. I acted emotionally disturbed, but goddammit, I was right to be. Like it was a moral obligation because society was so fucked up. But I was actually very afraid that I was not special or distinct from all of the other film students sold a lie on how extra special they were. I was unable to accept middle terms, so acting out became the easiest (actually only) path of remaining special. Thus the priming of the middle-class privileged boy goes and goes and goes...Described early on in the chapter as the life of a kleenex, blowing around in the wind, and saying to itself, "Where shall I go today?"

Our narrator has that last bit of caring in him and uses it. I feel like it is the kind of caring rarely called on, but that we all have programmed into us. When he listens to the substitute tax lector, who is described as the first person he could see an authentic value of authority in, he becomes willing to change his game up. The next week he finds in the paper that the IRS is recruiting, goes there with resolve, he stays up all night studying its material, traverses a blizzard to get to the dingy recruitment center again, and finds himself as the lone survivor from the previous day's orientation that bothered to show up for the rest of his life. That what possibility of ordinary heroism he witnessed at the lecture surely had HAPPENED, and there was no unknowing it, and that life can be all forward from here. He makes an actual decision based on a supernatural sense of a power and purpose that he values himself enough to apply effort to, and so fills his life with what it is missing. He works as a consistent and mature person. He gets perspective. And he gets to tell about it.

DFW is so deft at honestly exploring all of the most intricate and private crannies of the modern mental experience. So heavy and so light our brains tend to be, back and forth. Very little in the medium range, which would allow one to, for instance, sit at a desk and examine tax returns all day. What our brains say can seem so silly out loud, but only once we start interacting with each other and doing our daily tasks. The thoughts in the moment can burn so heated and heavy, and dress just like the truth. They burn us up and cripple some of us, and keep people in bed or send them toward obsessions for means of checking out. DFW more than once said fiction felt like the closest thing to not being alone. He really brought that concerted purpose to his writing--seemingly, as the main objective of his task as a novelist. That it could be the closest and truest way to understand how we, each to ourselves and all alike, can think and as a result, behave. And so much of life is thinking and not telling. But then acting kind of funny. Needing courage to do the logical or sane thing, but being drawn instead to the crazy one. I know it to be true that the false power of my mental idiocy can be so quickly deflated and relieved when somebody honestly shares the same thought that I felt crazy for thinking. DFW takes a needle to all these ideas we get that blow up like balloons and fill our head. Full of air, and taking up way too much room. He also provides a viable--albeit slightly dissapointing--solution, which is the middle-ground.

DFW often insisted that he was just a guy. Seemingly, he felt that our commonalities bear a greater importance in this life than our uniqueness. This is not exactly great news for somebody who had been told he was such such such such a GENIUS most of his adulthood. I read somewhere that he would respond to this by saying, "I did the reading." One of my favorite things that William James said was, "There is very little difference between one person and another, but what little there is, is very important." I can see the value in his love of differences. It is the spice of people, and of life. I also think that a modern American, especially in the form of a late 70's suburban Chicago kid dressed in shoddy jeans and untied Timberlands, that goes to college and drinks on school nights and rips a bong in front of the tv and leaves fast food cup rings on his parent's storied furniture, is a common experience that results from us youth being in love with how special we are--and frankly, kind of taught to feel that way. Concern for others does not apply to the specials. The narrator, on the other hand, has an annoying tic that keeps track of the amount of words spoken in any given conversation. This is only part of the weird package of traits that is what he claims makes him maybe one in ten thousand people who fits the profile of a perfect IRS worker. In other words, the anomalies lead him to the gates of a common fulfillment in a human life. Don't we all just want to feel like a completely perfect fit in our jobs and in our lives? I envy his job. I envy the way he feels about his duty and his existence. But I can too--the empowerment is that we ALL can be happy working at our own IRS. Be as it may, it was the IRS where his efforts were needed, and it relieved the internal suffering of trying to process and be the person he thought he was supposed to be. He executed a version of him he wanted to be. The narrator acts as a powerful profile for how we spend so much effort trying to conform to an environment without knowing any better, how much we hurt over it, and then how our natural differences hold so much the key in finding common joys--in what we need to find some peace in our existence. In this case--straight-up Viktor Frankl-style--it's Meaning and Purpose. Something unusual leading to the very humble parameters human men and women are programmed to want and need and experience. A religious experience. A phenomenon of the ordinary. I want this, but that won't do a damn thing. Breaking wide open (ouch) and listening deep will help. Per the advice of the mystic poet Kabir, "Do Not Go Off Somewhere Else!" What is in front of one's face are the only things to work with.

A good novelist, and I think at times DFW can be great, is unusually receptive. It can really hurt to be so receptive and sensitive. After all, we are creatures--cruel, self-serving, and survival-ensuring. But receptivity that turns to honesty and then articulation, that is just the thing that I felt so healed by when a meddling, confused, angry, repressed make-up of misdirection. I happened across a few nice books in high school, and this devotion to letters, and later films and music, built from a foundation of healing and feeling understood. The impulse for creativity I now have come to believe, is to turn this great relief of being understood around on its heels and to seek to understand for others. That would be my only good reason to write, I think. The novelist, as a receptor who is honest about what is going on and precise and funny and sad in explaining it, is needed to update and refresh the same human problems in a way that can heal our feelings of being alone in our heads. DFW is speaking MY truth...I'm grateful for that. "Does the world really need another writer?" I often ask myself. By this definition, yes, it needs plenty.

I do severely want THIS one back though. It's so hard for me not to get sad about his death. It's easy for me to look at my own past experiences of needing to check out all the time, and to others I've known as the living-dead or as even more successful at self-eradication, and see that our actions were those of a person made sick on the habit of being afraid and checking out. Of feeling fucking tired of not having a purpose, being useful, and those who gave in to the temptation of just taking control and making it stop. Sometimes that feeling becomes the last page of a life and sometimes not. Sometimes people who walk around every moment wanting it to stop grow a bigger pair of balls on that particular day, and then it just is over. These are the gritty and practical details about a certain kind of suicide--I feel it's an authentic perspective.

DFW though I don't know. He was so useful to somebody like me, and many others. The ideas are sound and spot on. He was one of the few high profile writers aiming for sincerity and a thoughtful and sane understanding of it all. I don't know anything what it is like to be him, his age, successful. But it is like his "genius" show-offy prose and ideas were always the mess in his head that he felt the pressure to express for his happy admirers. I connect with his most plain writing. The way he weaves ideas and details and thought processes in and out of this chapter, building momentum with a huge range of emotions that leaves me to feel like I now know a whole clan of people living a familiar life to mine, makes me INSIST that he saw how life works with clarity. This is the sort of piece that is not achieved by effortless gift, but by good writerly craftsmanship and careful thought. Real dirty hands kind of writing. I'm sure it was very hard to write. But not the kind you feel guilty and insufficient for after completing. The genius part of him must have felt it was shit. He was surely loved by his fans and people. But that kind of love I wish he'd found was of the unconditional sort--the kind of regular value and love that everybody is granted just for being created as a human being. I guess when you're in the shit, you don't think too much of your value though. I feel like many going through the frustrations of mental illness (which tends to exert its own will after a while), are completely able to understand what is going with them on an intellectual level. The knowledge is just not enough. It takes something more than knowing, and some don't get to feel the wonder of how that "more" thing feels. He was a gift equal to any other man or woman, and at his best as an author, was open to being an unusually articulate normal person. All the words bouncing around must have hurt a lot. I imagine it hurt to be so receptive and sensitive. But in the end, all of his suffering helped me feel less alone. I must insist that there is worth in that. To call him a genius maybe feeds the DFW that was trying to be an idea of what he was supposed to be, and I'm sure on a daily basis felt real career pressure to be that guy. After all, that fucking million dollars he got read "GENIUS" on the top of the check. DFW's unusual assets as a person are certainly acknowledged and appreciated by me, but to call him just another guy is where all the powers of him being able to connect to me and other readers are.

Healthy-mindedness, I insist, relies on an awareness of and a belief in the magic of the every day things--few young Americans would identify those things as what they want. A real joy of growing up the past few years has been discovering that there is magic to the simple experiences of life again. Some I know have fallen in love with riding bikes again. Some like to lay on the lawn and feel the grass and to go swimming. Those that have had kids live the little discoveries again, and often. But you can see when it happens for people growing out of post-adolescence. It's not the little ragin' boy in a man's body who still likes to make waves, but a deeper more middle of the path solution. It can be really beautiful to watch the contentment make its way back into our bones after a tumultuous young adulthood--and words (or at least mine) kind of fall short in describing that. Let's just say that the joys are enough to do the repetitive tasks, rigid structures, tax paying, tired all the time, bottom line, security-stressing, hooey. DFW writes like he understood the relief of being so secure in the discoveries of adulthood. He seems to be saying that the destinations on the human map are the same age-old concepts. So how come he could never wrest the peace out of his own life? Is that what made him so smart about it on the page, is that he still struggled with the questions to give insight to the rest of us? When we make such major discoveries about our lives we tend to move forward and let the explanation float away. He was looking deep into it in his mid-forties. The questions don't help though, so I'll stop there.