posted by the cold cowboy @ 12:21 AM
Sunday, September 14, 2008
david foster wallace hung himself, and i'm sad about it.
donkeyscotch.
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8 Comments:
you're not alone.
I'm fucking in mourning.
Fuck.
yep. in a bit of a shock.
His parents say that he'd been dealing with severe depression recently, and had gone off of his meds at a doctor's recommendation, due to side effects. He'd tried everything recently, including electro-convulsive therapy.
I'm not sure why but I'm a little comforted that it was actual mental illness, and not severe abstraction that drove him over the edge.
truly a dark day, fellows. i'm picturing a jim-henson's-funeral-type tableau, but all the muppets are replaced by downcast mute avatars of don gately, hal incandenza, michael pemulis, the moltke guy who sculpted w/his own colon, and the hundreds of other orphaned characters that have helped me understand what good fiction can do.
i'm not going to pretend to know what else to say.
---
stridewide, re: the tail end of your last comment-
where do you draw that line?
I've been thinking about that since I wrote that. You can find your way out of abstraction, I think. That's the difference.
That exact comment, bloomy, is why i find the "actual mental illness" suicides so much more terrifying. Abstraction I can handle, i can understand, but that people just seem to be hardwired to kill themselves, and have to be on guard against that their entire lives, is scary to me. I can't imagine the constant vigilance required. My understanding is that Elliott Smith also seemed to be active in trying to treat himself as much as possible, but when it's always there, a person's mood just has to change a little, or medicine fails, and the people around them lose focus for just a little while, and--poof--it's over. The relentlessness of depression is a horror, I think. A couple years ago an 11-year old boy hung himself with a belt in Oxford. 11. Imagine if that battle was there from 11 to, say, 46 when DFW did himself in, or 62 when Vonnegut tried. I can't imagine the exhaustion.
I agree, dan. But then again, I'd prefer it was something that he couldn't do anything about rather then something he talked himself in to. That wouldn't jibe right in my head with the person I think he was and sort of, in some way, need him to be to be able to write what he did.
Check http://www.mcsweeneys.net/ asap, They have an ongoing thread of good personal experience and background on DFW. It really made me feel better, a little bit. Still real sad, but better.
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