In Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” Satan and his fellow rebel angels are ignominiously flung from heaven down to hell after losing their battle with God, Jesus, and the other loyal angels. If ever there was a contest where the winner was never in doubt…
This famous Fall gives rise to two of Satan’s immortal quotes. The first, “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven,” has never appealed to me. Reigning over anything carries with it way too much management responsibility.
But the second, “The mind is its own place and, in itself, can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven,” is one that I’ve quoted so often to myself that it’s become a permanent part of my mental armature.
Now I’ve never been able to take a hellish, or bad, circumstance and make it seem heavenly. At best, and only recently, I’ve been able to use perspective to remind myself of countervailing and more durable circumstances in my life such as family and friends. Then I can realize that my feeling of despondency will probably not survive a good night’s sleep, or finding a new book I like, or a good game of tennis with good friends.
When I lacked that power of perspective and the despondency persisted for days, then weeks, that’s when my gloom spiraled. Because the longer the despondency lasted, the more permanent it seemed. (1)
But it’s the making a “hell of heaven” part that I’m focused on, because the power of a mind to launch an attack against itself despite, or out of all proportion, to one’s life circumstances is one of the scariest features of human existence. And I’ve never been confronted with the expression of a more powerful attack of the mind than that of David Foster Wallace’s narrator Neal in “Good Old Neon.”
Neal’s voice is one that anyone can relate to––simple words, nothing fancy, even a gratuitous “irregardless” thrown in as a sort of “just folks” shibboleth. Neal beguiles us with that voice that does its best to hide the fact that it belongs to a person who happens to be cursed with a once in a generation brain at war with itself.
The opening few lines:
“My whole life I’ve been a fraud. I’m not exaggerating. Pretty much all I’ve ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me to other people. Mostly to be liked and admired. It’s a little more complicated than that, maybe. But when you come right down to it it’s to be liked, loved. Admired, approved of, applauded, whatever. You get the idea.”
As I said, it’s a seductive voice because it feels as if someone is talking to you off the cuff, unbothered by repetition, careful not to scare you off, even qualifying the “it’s a little more complicated…” with an innocuous seeming “maybe.”
The beginning grabs me. Who doesn’t sometimes, or often, feel like a fraud, acting in a way we don’t really feel because we crave the approval of others?
As the narration unfolds, we learn that Neal can pretty much place himself at the top of any activity he puts his mind to. School, sports, girlfriends, work, meditation, even Fundamentalist religion where no one else can match his devotion or his manufactured frenzy of talking in tongues. But he’s convinced himself that all his achievements have always been, and will always be, at the service of a terrible deception, a surface act hiding his empty, fraudulent interior.
Neal first discovers this talent for deception at the age of four when he breaks a valuable bowl. Confronted by his parents, he instinctively confesses. But he does so by devising a deliberately unbelievable story involving his older sister, a story delivered in such an innocent and naïve way that his parents are convinced it was his sister who broke the bowl, and that Neal concocted his confessional story in a valiant, precocious, and admirable effort to protect her.
A lot of the story takes place in the office of Neal’s analyst, Dr. G., who Neal quickly sizes up as a repressed gay man and then “play[s] with him the way a cat does with a dead bird.” (2)
Neal’s game is to say something and then predict what Dr. G.’s response will be. Neal soon finds this game tiresome so he decides to give Dr. G. a big reveal, the crux of Neal’s deep unhappiness.
“I seemed always to have had this fraudulent, calculating part of my brain firing away all the time, as if I were constantly playing chess with everybody and figuring out that if I wanted them to move a certain way I had to move in such a way as to induce them to move that way”.
Hearing Neal’s admission of his fraudulence, Dr. G. leans back in triumph and then makes the observation Neal predicted he would. How can Neal be a complete fraud if he’s telling Dr. G. the reality of his fraudulence?
Neal’s reaction:
“And although I played along with him for a while so as not to prick his bubble, inside I felt pretty bleak indeed, because now I knew that he was going to be just as pliable and credulous as everyone else, he didn’t appear to have anything close to the firepower I’d need to give me any hope of getting helped out of the trap of fraudulence and unhappiness I’d constructed for myself.”
Neal has already explained to the reader that he is trapped in a “ fraudulence paradox,” which he is unable to escape. The more he tries to impress people to convince them he isn’t a fraud, the more of a fraud he feels, which makes him increase his efforts to impress so that he can better hide his growing feelings of fraudulence.
Neal has locked himself into the tyranny of a disastrous, formal logic theorem, formulaic and mathematical in nature, thus unyielding to any alteration. (This 1991 story is the embodiment of what many fear about the dangers of artificial intelligence.) This leads to catastrophe, and it’s catastrophizing that is a major symptom of a mind that turns on itself. (3)
I have catastrophized so many things that turned out to be unimportant. Usually about a mistake or setback at work, which led to doubts about my abilities, which led to the thought that I’d soon be discovered as not very good at my job, and then fired and disgraced. People would know that I was not at all the “smart” person I portrayed.
These episodes were awful and completely unnecessary, often lasting for weeks or, in the case of my two longer bouts of despondency, a year or so each time.
What a waste that I allowed my mind free rein like that. I was lucky that my mind could eventually be turned aside, because I certainly don’t have nearly the logician’s “firepower” that Neal has in the story or that David Foster Wallace had in real life. (4)
If you want to read Good Old Neon, you can google it and a pdf will show up.
Notes
(1) I use the term “despondency," because although I thought I was “depressed,” that term seems too amorphous.
(2) My favorite scene in “Good Will Hunting” is Will’s baffling of a couple of haplessly overmatched analysts. Clip below.
(3) If catastrophizing is proceeding by numerous steps of the imagination to the worst possible outcome, then its mirror image is living in a fantasy world of one’s own devising where one is always the hero of the story.
(4) As Neal says, “…logicians with incredible firepower can devote their whole lives to solving these [paradoxes] and still end up beating their heads against the wall.”
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Good old neon may be my favorite DFW piece. Because I think it reflects not only his state of mind; but also his frustration with psychiatry. Or his experience with practicing doctors.
“The mind is its own place and, in itself, can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven,” So true. I like to think that meditation can help with this normal but tricky condition. Thank you.