More conversations and emails.

I say the wrong thing.








Life is unfair.

People who work very hard and do the right thing sometimes go under: the systems that are in place don't always ensure that people who have done the right thing will survive. We can then decide to try to do something about it or look the other way. If we do something about it we may ourselves end up in the position of going under: the cost to an individual of rectifying an injustice is often prohibitive.

Life is unfair.

Back in late 2001 my publishers made a terrifying $150,000 accounting error in their own favour on my royalties statement. I had just had a meeting with an agent who had said she would introduce me to new editors. My publishers had offered $500,000+ for a new 2-book deal including world rights; this terrifying royalties snafu was one of the reasons this was non-negotiable. I hired the agent and when the dust had settled I had met no new editors and also had no deal and it was pretty messy. I managed to get the royalties mistake sorted out so I did have money in the bank. I was doped up on anti-depressants.

I got an email saying one of my cousins was dying of lung cancer. I did not know him well; I was not sure whether it was sentimental to go and see him, but my cousin's family said they thought it would be a good thing. So I went out to California to see him.

This would have been, I think, early 2002 (anti-depressants not so good for the memory). My mind was in a a dull, quiet state where it was impossible to read. I think the flight was 22 hours; I sat in the seat looking quietly at the seat ahead. I wasn't bored, or restless, or impatient; it felt good to sit quietly.

Kelly had been a surfer when young. After too many arrests for DUI he lost his licence and I think was made to go to AA. He stayed sober for 20 years; we discovered after his death that he had been a popular, charismatic speaker within AA. In one recording he talked about discovering that he had a brain tumour as well as lung cancer. He had been staying at my uncle's house and had no transportation. He said he sat on the steps outside, saying: How can I get to AA. How can I get to AA. I've got to get to AA. After a while he decided to go back to the beginning and go through the 12 Steps. He worked through to Step 3 and resolved to leave everything in the hands of a Higher Power.

When I got there he was staying with his twin sister and her boyfriend, a vet, who had a house on the side of a mountain in an avocado grove. They had set up a hospital bed on the ground floor with an oxygen mask and a TV with a 24-hour golf channel.

If you've ever been very very sick you know what it's like to be very weak: you don't actually have enough energy to lie in bed, it's just that lying in bed takes less energy than anything else, so you lie in bed, exhausted by the effort of lying in bed. That was the state he had reached. He had no health insurance. Robin and John were looking after him; he was now increasingly weak and confused because of the brain tumour, so he could not be left alone. John was an overworked, debtridden vet; the twin, Robin, worked in the practice; they were both overextended, but they were also looking after Kelly. Everyone was worried and exhausted.

A problem had come up. John's partner wanted to retire, so he wanted to be bought out of the practice. Under California state law, the value of the practice was assessed on gross rather than net income. The practice showed no profits - they had taken on a lot of debt to invest in new equipment - but that did not, of course, affect the value of the practice under law. So John needed to come up with a lot of money he did not have to buy out his partner, and it looked as though they would simply need to sell out and John would lose his business and have to start from scratch.

I did not really want to do another deal with my publishers, who had been so bad to work with in the past, but in the circumstances this seemed self-indulgent: $525,000 had been their opening offer. So I said I would be happy to help if necessary. I went back to Berlin, and then to London. Since things had gone badly wrong with the last agent I was nervous of bringing in a new one; I asked a friend connected with Miramax, someone I knew my editor liked, to talk to my editor, and I told her what to say. (I was worried about handling this myself because I was doped up on anti-depressants and barely able to talk.)

My cousin died shortly after I returned to England. I was still in talks with my friend when I got an emergency email from John. His partner had kept such bad records that the practice was not in a position to get financing from a bank, so John would in fact need to find funding elsewhere. The CPA handling the transaction now said that it would fall through if the money was not on hand by the end of the week. John's uncle had offered to put up half the money; John asked if I could put up the other $100,000.

I would, of course, rather have waited until my deal was solidly in place, but I had been told this was an emergency. So I sent John a cheque for $100,000, which left me with a few thousand. Meanwhile my friend talked to my editor.

For reasons that remain unclear, my friend decided to replace the things I had asked her to say with something completely different. (She told me this after the meeting, when it was too late to do anything about it.) There were all sorts of misunderstandings which I won't go into, the deal fell through again, and everyone was outraged.

This was very bad news, because tax had not been paid on the money I had sent John and there was no way of knowing when more money would come in. In the long run this would turn out to be a professional disaster from which (as it looks now) I would never recover. I talked to an agent about the books I wanted to write and what I needed for them and he said No Publisher Will Allow, I would have to self-publish. The Inland Revenue started demanding taxes and threatening legal action and insisting that if there was a problem I must come in and talk to someone. I was not able to talk. I sent my accountant an email explaining that I was clinically depressed and at risk of suicide and he said he did not think the Inland Revenue would be sympathetic. I made enquiries about getting committed to a mental institution and was told it was difficult to get committed to a residential facility.

It seemed to me that the best plan might be to commit a crime, some sort of crime that would entail a prison sentence, as one does not generally need to go through a lot of red tape to go to jail. This struck me as an absolutely brilliant idea (presumably the Inland Revenue would not pursue me in jail), but at the same time I could not help being aware that many people would see this as insane, and I could not help feeling that the very fact that the idea struck me as absolutely brilliant, the solution to all my problems, might in itself be a mark of insanity. Barclaycard sent me some credit card cheques with 6 months interest-free credit; I called them and got them to raise my credit card limit and sent Inland Revenue a cheque. (I could not quite see why Inland Revenue could not just charge me 29.4% APR or some such thing.) I came off the anti-depressants and went back to secretarial work. So it was rather unfortunate that my friend had felt unable to say what I had asked her to say.

I did, as I've said, end up negotiating a new deal with my editor in 2003, he promised a designer, I moved to New York, he refused to honour the contract. Bad news.

Now, sending John a cheque for $100,000 would have been generous, but not insanely generous, if my deal had gone through. It would was an act of hypererogatory virtue - but he himself had done something much harder, much more generous, which was to look after someone dying of lung cancer. Kelly was a close friend of John's, but this was still an act of extraordinary generosity. The burden would not have been so heavy if the US had a proper healthcare system; John stepped in to fill that gap, and he now stood to lose everything he had worked for. He was an absolutely amazing guy, and I did not want to see that happen.

Talking to my editor, on the other hand, and relaying accurately the things I wanted in the deal, do not strike me as particularly taxing, let alone examples of exceptional generosity. It was not complicated; it came at no cost to the person concerned; had my friend felt able to do as she was asked, I would have had to work with people who were hard to work with, but I would not have faced financial disaster. So, you know, life is unfair.

Honouring the terms of a contract, again, is not an example of hypererogatory virtue. This is not an example of my editor doing me a favour, or showing exceptional generosity: this is an example of my editor complying with terms that are legally binding. Breaking the contract is an example of my editor being not just an unmitigated little shit but grossly dishonest. Life is unfair.

Paying royalties on sales of hardback books, again, is not an example of hypererogatory virtue. The publishers had made a profit on the book before it was published; they had sold 20,000 or so copies in hardback and owed me money. Paying it is not an example of doing me a favour, let alone exceptional generosity: this is an example of someone in the bowels of the royalties department accurately inputting data in a spreadsheet (which is what people in royalties are paid to do), rather than making a complete cock-up of it, so that a cheque in the appropriate amount is generated when the statement is sent out. Thereby obviating the need to hire an agent just to get paid. Life is unfair.

Life is really unfair, because we have before us an example of a much better career move.

Comparisons are odious.
Invidious comparisons are especially odious.

Let's not be odious.

The problem is.

There are forms of generosity I am able to recognise as improbable.

It would astound me if a reader were to write and offer me $100,000.
It would astound me if a reader were to offer me a year's accommodation, rent-free, in a second home that's unoccupied.

I am able to recognise these as offers that are wildly unlikely to come my way.

There are other forms of assistance that strike me as well within the realm of possibility.

If a reader recommends an agent, it seems straightforward for the reader to provide all information known to the reader. This looks like something that would take 10 minutes of the reader's time.

This turns out to be as wildly improbable as making me a gift of $100,000. I didn't know that.

Suppose I have, on the one hand, readers blundering into my life with unhelpful suggestions and, on the other hand, readers making me a gift of $100,000. The blunderers are not a problem.

But suppose I have a string of blunderers and no gifts of $100,000. Each blunderer wipes out a couple of years.

It's hard to be sane.

This is, without a doubt, unspeakably dull. I apologise. There's the faint hope, I'm afraid there really is the faint hope, not that a reader will give me $100,000, but that the blunderers might, with a rare glimmer of compassion, refrain.

The only time I ever thought of suicide was in a graduate program -- not at Cornell, fortunately, so no bridge available. Every other time I found myself in a bad situation, I could think of ways to get out of it. Find a better job. Break up with an obnoxious boyfriend. Change majors. Move. There's almost always a regular, non-suicidal way out of things. But that graduate program -- I had so much of myself invested in it that I couldn't just drop out when it turned toxic. Or rather, death and dropping out seemed like equally devastating options, so there wasn't much to choose between them.

I did get help that let me muddle through and finish, but it took me a couple of years to recover afterwards. No need to either drop out or die, it seems, but finishing was the hardest thing I ever did. The jury's still out on whether it was worth the trouble.

What made it so ghastly? I think that it was a "closed environment" where anything that went wrong would fester and intensify. Switching to another program was very difficult. People who had borrowed money to attend would have a hard time paying back if they didn't get degrees that let them work in the field. And so if anyone wanted to bully you and make your life hell, you had to take it for the duration. People were caught in a trap.

Commenter on The suicide conundrum, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Atlantic Monthly

Typical of the African situation were the Mende, who kept considerable numbers of slaves for both social and economic reasons and on the whole treated them well, so well indeed that it was difficult for an outsider to distinguish between free and slave. The primary social difference between the two groups was the honorlessness of the slaves, a condition that the free man was reluctant to point out in the presence of strangers, knowing how crushing it would be to the slave.... The loss of honor was most evident among aged slaves. In no other part of the world was age more respected and honored than in traditional African societies. But old Mende slaves never received this respect. They were minors who would never receive the respect due to a mature adult.

Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (83)

The class of the lowly is the source from which the master class draws its livelihood and leisure. Thraldom is a degree of cannibalism. It is a system of man feeding upon man. The master is a human parasite, who, by the right of might, has secured his fellow-men in the bonds of thraldom in order to feed upon them and to use them for the satisfaction of his appetite.

C.O. Williams, Thraldom in Ancient Iceland, p. 133 (via Patterson, Slavery and Social Death)

Let us begin with the Tupinamba of South America, a primitive, warlike group among whom slavery existed in its most elementary for. Economic motives were wholly absent in the enslavement of captives. Slaves were kept for two purposes only: as a living exhibition of the master's honor and valor in war, and ultimately as meat for the cannibalistic orgy that might take place as long as fifteen years after capture. Between being taken prisoner and being eaten, the captive "recognize[d] himself as a slave and a defeated man, he follow[ed] the victorious man, serve[d] him faithfully without having to be watched."

The slave among the Tupinamba was constantly aware of the fact that he was a doomed person. Even if he escaped, his own tribe would not take him back. His sense of degradation was as intense as his master's sense of glory. A Tupinamban slave told Father Evreux that what really bothered him was the prospect of being eaten,

but not to be able to take revenge before dying on those who ware to eat me. I remember that I am the son of an important man in my country... Now I see myself as a slave without being painted and no featheres attached to my head, my arms, around my waist, as the important people of my country are decorated, then I want to be dead.

Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study

not waving

The new captain jumped from the cockpit, fully dressed, and sprinted through the water. A former lifeguard, he kept his eyes on his victim as he headed straight for the owners who were swimming between their anchored sportfisher and the beach. “I think he thinks you’re drowning,” the husband said to his wife. They had been splashing each other and she had screamed but now they were just standing, neck-deep on the sand bar. “We’re fine, what is he doing?” she asked, a little annoyed. “We’re fine!” the husband yelled, waving him off, but his captain kept swimming hard. ”Move!” he barked as he sprinted between the stunned owners. Directly behind them, not ten feet away, their nine-year-old daughter was drowning. Safely above the surface in the arms of the captain, she burst into tears, “Daddy!”

How did this captain know, from fifty feet away, what the father couldn’t recognize from just ten? Drowning is not the violent, splashing, call for help that most people expect. The captain was trained to recognize drowning by experts and years of experience. The father, on the other hand, had learned what drowning looks like by watching television. If you spend time on or near the water (hint: that’s all of us) then you should make sure that you and your crew knows what to look for whenever people enter the water. Until she cried a tearful, “Daddy,” she hadn’t made a sound. As a former Coast Guard rescue swimmer, I wasn’t surprised at all by this story. Drowning is almost always a deceptively quiet event. The waving, splashing, and yelling that dramatic conditioning (television) prepares us to look for, is rarely seen in real life.

Drowning Kid? Not Likely, g.captain.com, ht janet reid

hm

There's a piece by Wyatt Mason in NYRB on Lipsky's book about David Foster Wallace, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. At one point he comments on an early story, "The Planet Trillaphon As It Stands In Relation To The Bad Thing" (first published in The Amherst Review, Vol XII). A story I have never read. Here's Mason:

In “Planet Trillaphone,” Wallace puts that “opening” to indicative use. As the narrator divulges the precarious details of his depression and how the drugs he’s on both keep him from suicide and produce a new species of intolerable feeling, the reader is run up against the story’s surprising final sentence—”Except that is just highly silly when you think about what I said before concerning the fact that the Bad Thing is really”—a sentence that doesn’t conclude. Without outlet, the flow of the story ceases midstream. What has happened? One can’t know such things, the story would argue, just as when, without warning or explanation, we receive news that a friend has committed suicide, we can’t know precisely what has happened: we’re left with the shock of a life cut short and for which there can be no reassuring resolution. Life is regularly all beginning and middle; why should fiction be any different?

I don't know the story. I do know that Wallace was not only a writer but a mathematician and modal logician. I read Mason with furrowed brow, thinking, what can this possibly mean? I write:

All sorts of things might have happened to the narrator: he might have been knocked down by a car, stung by a bee, kidnapped by pygmies, or just realised suddenly that it was time for the Simpsons. Or he might have jumped off a cliff. It's not easy to see how these are in principle unknowable (we can't know these things?), nor why breaking off in mid-sentence should imply that they were. If a friend commits suicide, whether with or without warning, I presumably do know, at any rate, that s/he has committed suicide (that is, I have the sort of fact Wallace withholds); in the absence of this sort of knowledge I would have no reason to speculate about motives. And life is not regularly all beginning and middle: humans are begotten, born, and die. (I am not enough of a mathematician to be sure of this, but is it actually possible for something to have a beginning, a middle and no end? The interior of a sphere could perhaps loosely be described as all middle but has neither beginning nor end. The set of positive numbers has a beginning, no end and no middle. Could there - well, Wallace would know, but in any case, even if such a thing is logically possible it is hardly true of life as we know it.) (When I say I find myself wondering what it means, I mean that the things it seems to mean are both false and inconsistent with each other.)

So, yes, this is me, writing merrily along without ever having read the story. This is precisely the confrontational, argumentative tone which provoked the resignation of my agent, it wins me no friends and alienates people disposed to help; I put it, as one does, in the drafts folder.

Some time later I have a radical idea. Why not, erm, read the story?!!!!

Some quotes from the story (here in PDF):

And you start thinking about this pretty vicious situation, and you say to yourself, "Boy oh boy, how the heck is the Bad Thing able to do this?" You think about it -- really hard, since it's in your best interests to do so -- and all of a sudden it sort of dawns on you... that the Bad Thing is able to do this to you because you're the Bad Thing yourself! The Bad Thing is you.

That's when the Bad Thing just absolutely eats you up, or rather when you just eat yourself up. When you kill yourself. All this business about people committing suicide when they're "severely depressed;" we say, "Holy cow, we must do something to stop them from killing themselves!" That's wrong. Because all these people have, you see, by this time already killed themselves, where it really counts. By the time these people swallow entire medicine cabinets or take naps in the garage or whatever, they've already been killing themselves for ever so long. When they "commit suicide," they're just being orderly. They're just giving external form to an event the substance of which already exists and has existed in them over time. Once you realize what's going on, the event of self-destruction for all practical purposes exists. There's not much a person is apt to do in this situation, except "formalize" it, or, if you don't quite want to do that, maybe "E.C.T." or a trip away from the Earth to some other planet, or something. (pp 29/30)

end of story:

The big question is whether the Bad Thing is on the planet Trillaphon. I don't know if it is or not. Maybe it has a harder time, in a thinner and less nutritious atmosphere. I certainly do, in some respects. Sometimes, when I don't think about it, I think I have just totally escaped the Bad Thing, and that I am going to be able to lead a Normal and Productive Life as a lawyer or something here on planet Trillaphon, once I get so I can read again.
Being far away sort of helps with respect to the Bad Thing.
Except that is just highly silly when you think about what I said before concerning the fact that the Bad Thing is really

All right, class.

What did he say the Bad Thing was earlier?
And what was the logical conclusion?
And what has he just realised?

One can’t know such things, the story would argue, just as when, without warning or explanation, we receive news that a friend has committed suicide, we can’t know precisely what has happened

AAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH

A point of contention between me and my former agent was that I thought maybe the NYRB would like me to write something for them.

Moving right along, here's something I don't get.

Mason talks about Wallace's decision to use the vernacular, which he thinks creates an intimacy between writer and reader: given the atomization and loneliness of contemporary life, that's our opening.

Well . . . the vernacular in this story is straight out of Salinger, and the odd thing about Salinger is, he used it, on the one hand, for the voice of an unintellectual prep school drop-out (Holden Caulfield) and, on the other, for the allegedly exceptionally intelligent, more or less suicidal Glass family. So whatever Wallace is doing, it isn't new. I slightly get the sense that what the vernacular is really doing is giving an anti-intellectual intellectual (the equivalent of a self-hating Jew or homophobic homosexual) the chance to build some kind of bridge to people he perceives, at any rate, as unintellectual. It's hardly surprising that this dodge doesn't succeed in reducing the writer's sense of isolation and alienation. All it really manages to do is persuade a certain sort of reader that he doesn't have to pay attention (which, again, is hardly likely to reduce feelings of isolation and alienation).

I've been clinically depressed. Wouldn't have described it the way Wallace does. Maybe not talk about that today.

to be or not to be

TAR ART RAT and The Popeye Journals both had posts on Owen Wilson's alleged suicide attempt. TPJ talks about the stigma of mental illness.

I don't know whether Wilson did, in fact, attempt suicide and if he did I have no idea what led him to do so. I think, though, that this is something that is easily misunderstood.

As an actor Wilson faces a more extreme version of a problem we all face. A self is a set of habits; people like people to be predictable, consistent, to conform to a set of expectations. It's possible to find oneself trapped in a set of bad habits and expectations; someone who gets that close to the edge is like a train that has only two options: jumping the tracks or staying on them.

Consider the Hamlets of Gibson and Branagh. Mel Gibson had a track record as a sex symbol; Kenneth Branagh had a track record as a Shakespearean actor. In Branagh's Hamlet, we saw Branagh's yearning for what Gibson took for granted -- he'd gone blond, he'd spent months bodybuilding, here was Branagh striding the screen like a former fat girl who's reached her ideal weight. In Gibson's Hamlet, we saw Gibson's yearning for what Branagh took for granted -- the language of Shakespeare. Here was someone who'd spent years in the valley of McScripts, entranced by the glamour of the language -- giving himself the luxury of one the greatest parts ever written for an actor. To be or not to be, that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them--

Who do you think you are, Mel? Just who do you think you are?

Eliot's Prufrock:

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,	115
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

When people see suicide as a sign of mental illness they want everything to go back to normal; they are often looking for someone who has been socialised to be an attendant lord or Fool to get back to the place he's been assigned. (Get back! Get back! Get back to where you once belonged!)

Borges:

Como todos los hombres de Babilonia, he sido procónsul: como todos, esclavo; también he conocido la omnipotencia, el oprobio, las cárceles. (Like all the men of Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, a slave; I have also known omnipotence, opprobrium, prison cells.)

If we had the Lottery of Babylon we would not see that particular form of mental illness: killing off the body as the only way to stop playing the Fool.

Philosophers and Psychologists

I was once a Junior Lecturer in Classics at St Hilda's College, Oxford. One day the philosophy tutor, Kathy Wilkes, came back to lunch after a meeting at which philosophers and psychologists had tried to do business. Wilkes, maddened, explained the difference between a philosopher and a psychologist.

A philosopher, she said, will say: 'X is COMPLETELY WRONG! I disagree UTTERLY! ABSOLUTELY! CATEGORICALLY! X has failed to grasp the FUNDAMENTAL point at issue, which is . . . ' and will then proceed to restate the original position with some minor adjustment.

A psychologist, on the other hand, speaks as follows. 'I couldn't agree with X more. I think X has captured what all of us are thinking, X has made a vital contribution to the discussion, I really have nothing to add, I'd just like to enhance what X has said . . . ' and proceeds to set out a position diametrically opposite to that of X.

Wilkes died in 2003. (An obituary can be seen here.) I was thinking of her today when I contemplated the 22 posts in the Drafts Folder of this blog. The 25th is the third anniversary of my last suicide attempt; I've been trying to work out how to tackle the subject of suicide, which I wanted to have a blog of its own, Tender Only to One. I ran a search on Google for 'suicide' and the first 100 hits were sites that seemed to be run by persons of a psychologistical disposition.

Prolonged psychologist-exposure drives philosophers insane. The advice available online does not tell philosophers how to survive all the psychologists who agree with them on every particular. It does not point the philosopher in the direction of professions that are relatively psychologist-free. It encourages psychologists in their worst habits.

So there probably is a need for a blog for suicidal philosophers. It's important to know you're not alone. Among the throngs of people who are in perfect agreement with you and merely want to enhance what you say, there are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions who think you are WRONG, you've COMPLETELY missed the POINT, who disagree with you UTTERLY, ABSOLUTELY, CATEGORICALLY.