68-85
07.03.09
3:22 pm
This time around, unfortunately in some senses, the Kate Gompert section meant everything more. Not just the demonstration of a scene, how deep clinical depression can look to a sympathetic ear, but how it does look; a deep understanding of how an advanced society that addresses every possible need can still fail to fix a persistent, lingering plight not overly demanding of resources. How depression is in some ways not even fully conceived of by the very people offering aid, even when everything is known about it. The most striking thing about this passage this time 'round was how impotent the physician was, not by any shortcomings on his part, but by his very nature. It's not even quotable, really, this impotence or rich demonstration of depression, because it isn't. It's just everything about the struggle here and how a patient interacts with time and stimulus and potential solutions. I guess then the question becomes but how would you even treat such a thing without love? Oh if DFW had such a passage describing someone in love, someone married, that still found suicide so necessary and inevitable, it might just answer everything. But he was so nice; he probably consciously refrained from jotting it down.
I had a bit of difficulty going through the Mario/Schtitt section. Difficulty that was difficult to even identify itself. In retrospect, after finishing and giving it a day, it may simply have been a case of struggling with Wallace's sometimes "indecisively subversive" specialist realism described by Andrew Seal's superb infinite summer post on potential subtleties of this realistic prose. I think this is the first context in which this might have bothered me; it really struck on the top of p.82 when applied to game theory, sports analysis, and set theory, a few areas i actually know something or other about. I was just left with a lingering sense that i didn't completely understand the point to it. And this is all before even mentioning the extremely unsettling rhetorical style, in which Mario seems to be listening not only to Schtitt, but also to the narrator, so that some phrases are ostensibly inserted solely for his benefit -- q.v. "This should not be rendered in exposition like this, but Mario Incandenza has a severely limited range of verbatim recall." -- or occasionally Mario will even respond to the narration as if it were Schtitt himself. But i think by the section's conclusion, it all came together, as Wallace will do to you sometimes. That maybe there wasn't exactly a specific point to be made with all these direct infinite references, but rather how such thoughts can interact with the later more direct discussion of the game and how it bounds and defines our life and provides the opportunities for exploration and playing. How really complex it all is, tennis or self-achievement in this modern age, fractal-like in its relation to us, and how we can comprehend and control our lives and what they are made out to be. Transstatistical not in a direct way, but in a meaningful way, as sports are meant to be. And then i thought i do hear this quite well indeed. And it was something i needed to hear, and didn't know, and this is why you pay attention to everything in this book.
-"Something almost too overt about the pathos of the posture"-
-"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."-
-"'Lurid is the word.'"-
-"He put her get me out of this in quotation marks. He was adding his own post-assessment question, Then what?, when Kate Gompert began weeping for real."-
-"Mario is basically a born listener. One of the positives to being visibly damaged is that people can sometimes forget you're there, even when they're interfacing with you. You almost get to eavesdrop. It's almost like they're like: If nobody's really in there, there's nothing to be shy about. That's why bullshit often tends to drop away around damaged listeners, deep beliefs revealed, diary-type private reveries indulged out loud; and, listening, the beaming and bradykinetic boy gets to forge an interpersonal connection he knows only he can truly feel, here."-
-"Gerhardt Schtitt does not so much dislike the modern O.N.A.N.ite U.S. of A. as find it hilarious and frightening at the same time. Probably mostly just alien."-
-"By learning, in palestra, the virtues that pay off directly in competitive games, the well-disciplined boy begins assembling the more abstract, gratification-delaying skills necessary for being a 'team player' in a larger arena: the even more subtly diffracted moral chaos of full-service citizenship in a State. Except Schtitt says Ach, but who can imagine this training serving its purpose in an experialist and waste-exporting nation that's forgotten privation and hardship and the discipline which hardship teaches by requiring? A U.S. of modern A. where the State is not a team or a code, but a sort of sloppy intersection of desires and fears, where the only public consensus a boy must surrender to is the acknowledged primacy of straight-line pursuing this flat and short-sighted idea of personal happiness:"-
-"Low-Bavarian for something like 'wandering alone in blasted disorienting territory beyond all charted limits and orienting markers,' supposedly."-
[archilochusColubris]
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