infinitedetox is blogging about addiction and Infinite Jest at infinitedetox.wordpress.com.
My name is infinitedetox and I am an addict.
Some time around May, 2004, I willfully entered into a relationship with pharmaceutical opiates. It began as a sort of experiment, quickly escalated into a recreation, and from there vectored toward present-day dependency on a straight line whose slope was gradual, but unwavering.
In December of last year it became apparent that this line would never flatten out or stabilize on its own, that it would just keep trundling on upwards, tending toward infinity given infinite time. This is when I started to get scared.
David Foster Wallace had just passed away and I decided to re-read41 Infinite Jest over the holidays, and something difficult to explain happened to me when I began digging into the book again. Somehow the book–and now brace yourself for one of those clichés that Wallace seems so interested in in IJ–made me want to be a better person. And it inspired me to stop taking drugs immediately, to Kick the Bird, via a mechanism which I’ve had a hard time articulating. But let me give it a stab anyway.
You’ve probably noticed that the idea of self-surrender is treated as a sort of grand, motivating force throughout Infinite Jest – cf. “American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away” (p. 53); cf. the Ennet House’s unnamed founder’s “sudden experience of total self-surrender”; and especially cf. every addicted character’s surrender to their enslaving Substance, every recovering character’s surrender to a Higher Power, and can it be just a coincidence that Don Gately’s very own AA group goes by the name White Flag?
Now let’s take a book. Any book will do, but I think Big Books like Infinite Jest or Gravity’s Rainbow or Ulysses work particularly well.42 The thing with books – the more you put into them, the more you get out of them (“Give It Away To Keep It”). You may not care about junior tennis or Quebecois separatism or avant-garde film or AA cliché-mongering, but if you’re going to make any sense of Infinite Jest you’re probably going to have to start caring, a lot. You’re going to have to accept that proto-fascist tennis instructors and disabled pistol-toting terrorists are capable of delivering frighteningly insightful critiques of U.S. culture. You’re going to have to lay aside your Irony Shields and believe, with all your heart, that clichés can be just as potent as Don Gately says they are. In other words, you’re going to have to surrender to the book.
Be careful not to confuse surrender with passivity. I’m talking about an active surrender here. The actively-surrendered reader will sift through reams of mathematical arcana in order to tease out the implications of an oblique reference, or follow an obscure narrative thread deep into the bowels of Greek mythology to flesh out the author’s hinted-at ideas. Surrendered readers develop an eye for the author’s shortcomings. They share in the author’s failings. They are engaged, but not encaged.43 It may be instructive to compare active surrender with the drooling, pants-soiling passivity of Substance abuse and Entertainment addiction as portrayed in IJ.
You can probably see where I’m going with this. What happened to me, on December 26, 2008, is that I surrendered myself completely to Infinite Jest. I signed some sort of metaphorical blood-oath committing myself to looking at the world through David Foster Wallace’s eyes. And what happened then was that I saw myself as DFW would have seen me, refracted through the wobbly nystagmic lens of Infinite Jest. Wallace’s judgments on addicts and addictions fell upon me with great force, and something about the ferocity of his critique, coupled with his profound compassion and humaneness toward the subject, compelled me to waste absolutely zero time in booting the pills and Getting My Shit Together.
Of course, the book ended, and vacation along with it. The circumstances of life returned to normal, and life’s normal stresses and anxieties returned along with them. I stayed clean for exactly two weeks, after which the addiction vector resumed its patient acclivation at precisely the same point it left off. My Shit went back into diaspora.
Fast-forward six months or so and here we are: another reading of Infinite Jest, another Total Surrender, another attempt to Starve the Beast. I don’t know, though – I’ve got a good feeling about this one. The circumstances, before which I admit complete powerlessness, are different, perhaps permanently so. As of this writing I am 10 days, 4 hours and 22 minutes sober, with some 758 pages of Infinite Jest left to go. But as they say — one day at a time.
Thank you for this. You are brave.
Good to hear you, infinitedetox. Keep on posting.
Love your blog and was glad to see you highlighted here at the mother ship, but I have one little gripe with your post: I don’t know that Wallace judges or provides brow-furrowed critiques of the addicts. I think he’s awfully compassionate and understanding about it all. Of course, I say this from the vantage of someone not fighting the Spider, so it may be a matter of perspective. Would be interested in reading more on your take, though.
Great point, and you’re absolutely right that he doesn’t seem interested in “passing judgment”, at least not in the conventional sense of the phrase.
What I was trying to get at is that there are parts in the book — say, where Marathe is talking about Americans’ willingness to enslave themselves, or when Wallace gets deep into the mind of an addict and shows what a terrible, fearful, pathetic kind of place it can be — at points like this I saw my self reflected. Simply put I was Identifying with certain situations and characters in ways that made me super, super uncomfortable. It was like seeing myself from outside myself. And so by basically borrowing Wallace’s perspective I was able to arrive at an assessment of my situation that I wouldn’t have been able to arrive at on my own. Does that explain it a little better?
Yes, that’s totally right. I see parts of my own compulsive behaviors in Erdedy, for example, so that section resonated a whole lot with me this go-around (in ways it hadn’t during previous reads). Wallace does a lot of the same thing in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, but instead of getting that view of how dependent you are on a substance, you get a view of what a manipulative asshole you are, even though you think of yourself as pretty modern and enlightened and reasonable and courteous.
It makes sense that you might feel DFW is judging the addicts, especially in light of Marathe’s conversations with Steeply, but don’t forget to consider the source! He and the separtist AFR are freaking nuts! The whole Quebecois scenario is crazier than anyone hopelessly physically and emotionally addicted to substances by their very nature meant to exploit your entire system into subservience. There is great sympathy in this book for the addicted, the lost, the searchers searching for a something bigger than themselves. It’s just that finding the right thing isn’t that easy. You’re still searching!
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Seems this weeks substitutes are more than capable. Great post. Thanks for writing it. I appreciate your truth and examination.
Congratulations on your sobriety! Ten days is amazing.
I, too, thank you for writing this and for your courage. I am the girlfriend of a recovering heroin addict (he’s six months sober as of last Friday!), and I am glad I waited to read this book until now. It found me, as books often do, when I most needed to read it. Addiction is such a confusing disease (and this is coming from someone who has suffered from severe depression), and it helps me to read about it from someone who knows more about it than me.
My boyfriend spent 90 days in rehab, and I read aloud the AA and treatment center segments of the book to him. There’s just something magical about it.
Through mechanisms I don’t really understand, the same thing has started for me with smoking. Recognizing that addiction is an irrational process to be fought through equally uncompromising means. Day 3 so far.
woohoo! death to the death sticks! keep it up!
Congrats on making it to Day 3. Isn’t that sort of a milestone with nicotine, where after three days or so the sheer physical horror of the withdrawal winds down a bit? My father tried, unsuccessfully, to quit chewing tobacco several times during my childhood so I have second-hand experience of what a total bee-yotch that must be.
Here’s one thing I learned about nicotine that pretty much scared me off tobacco for good: I was working on a vegetable farm one summer, where I learned that nicotine’s been used as an agricultural insecticide for years. The stuff is like Raid, basically.
Keep coming back.
Lovely. Thank you. And keep up the good work. (It works if you work it. Etc.)
Wonderful post. I wish you well.
I would also recommend Taking Certain Steps.
Great post, and best of luck. Remember, don’t try to be Evel Knievel.
I join everyone in thanking you for offering up such a self-reflective and vulnerable post. It’s more than I can say I would have been able to do. But I can’t shrug off the notion that the book addresses on some level exactly what you are attempting to do; namely, the replacement of one addiction with another. I can’t remember the exact section, but I believe it’s during an AA meeting that some of the crocodiles and Gately discuss the perils of hiding the spider behind something else. And since one of the big things I took away from your post was that this has already failed once, there’s certainly a red flag element. Not that I’m saying it will fail again, and even less that IJ is the empirical coach on this sort of thing, but I’ve had friends try to quit substances cold turkey before. Stay level, stay focused, and try not to treat IJ in the same light as your spider.
Thank you for the reality check. I hadn’t really thought about it in those terms — replacing one obsession with another — but I can see exactly what you’re getting at. And I agree, completely, that one failed quitting attempt is a major red flag. We’ll see how it goes…
I join with everyone else in saying thank you infinitedetox for this wonderful and deeply personal post. I have to say to this point in particular – if it works for you to replace your spider with IJ go for it. IJ won’t hurt or kill you or your loved ones – unless, of course, you drop it on your toe or fling it at someone! So, Hang In There and I’ll keep coming back to your blog to check in.
My first time through the book I was using many different substances. I know for a fact it kick-started a whole slew of self-reflections that enabled me, albeit awkwardly, to distance myself from the people and environments that contributed to the use. I kicked the worst of them, of course, only to replace them with good old fashioned alcoholism. That one, as well, is more or less under control, and I really ought to start attending meetings. And soon, I too, will be working on the smoking.
This second time through IJ is making a whole lot more sense. I know some of it is my sobriety. That first time through, though, was real magic. I was in my mid-twenties and through with a literature degree. Between required and volunteered reading I was beginning to think that near-orgasmic-pleasure-center-revelatory-reading was something I was too experienced or calloused to be capable of feeling anymore. Thank ye, dfw, wherever ye may be.
Everything I’ve read of Wallace’s makes me want to be a better person; and just as importantly, it seems to hint that such improvement is possible. There’s pathos, sure, but there’s infinite hope in his texts.
Good luck. Hang in there. Whatever other seemingly empty aphorisms you need, because as today’s reading suggests, sometimes such simplistic phrases work. They just do.
DFW speaks to us since we all have our addictions or obsessions, be it drugs, smoking, alcohol, dieting, shopping, lottery tickets, cleaning house, ebay, sex, having the best looking yard, whatever. Some can be considered harmless hobbies, some are more deadly. If your “thing” is dominating your thinking and interfering with actual one on one interfacing with live human beings, then it might be turning into Too Much Fun.
IJ really makes us ponder these things.
Infinitedetox, to quote the master, regarding your own battle, “I wish you way more than luck”.
Dear Infinitedetox,
Thank you very much for your post. I’m reading IJ for the first time and am having my issues with the book, but am determined to understand it to the best of my ability and to finish it! I am now going to be reading your blog as well because your story is no less important than the book and because I believe you will help me get through this tome. IJ and you have made me think about my own issues with obsession and certain activities. Thank you, thank you.
I’ve been sober 15 months so far, and IJ hits pretty hard and is also strangely reassuring. I aspire to, one day, be one of the Crocodiles.
I’d like to echo an earlier comment here: good to hear you.
[...] internet projects kind of weird me out–but have been following the non-spoiler posts and Infinite Detox piqued* my [...]
So glad you’re focusing on the addiction story line in IJ. At 1 year+ sober, for me IJ has been a reminder that I don’t ever want to go back there again. Keep up the good work. Remember the key to true sobriety, druglessness, or whatever you want to call it, is not just changing behavior (stopping injesting whatever your particular poison is) but changing thinking. Gately’s thoughts on this are truly wonderful (1st full para. p. 357 especially). He’s my favorite character.
Great post, Infinitedetox. It’s great to see so many ‘friends of the program’ out and about, too.
Among the many, many things that /IJ/ does well, it works especially well as a model for recovery. In my experience, recovering from addiction isn’t at all about increasing one’s ability to resist the disease’s progression (aka “white-knuckling”); but is instead about completely changing one’s orientation toward life: turning from so-called ‘self-sufficiency’ to ‘other-sufficiency.’ Learning to ‘handle’ problems by talking them out instead of acting them out. (At least one part of my brain is a veritable fount of AA-recovery-cliche-speak.)
My point, though, is this: an addict can’t change his or her thinking. Period. An addict can only allow his or her thinking to be changed by associating, and associating often, with other, in-recovery addicts (whose own sick minds were themselves changed by the same association). Recovery, I think, is essentially a process of osmosis.
Wallace’s depiction of Don Gately’s road to recovery is not so much inspirational (and it is IMHO inspirational) as it is instructive. Don doesn’t go it alone. Recall, that Don simply wakes up one day to find that his desire to use has simply ‘gone away.’ But also recall that this ‘miracle’ happened after many days and weeks and months of simply showing up to AA meetings, sharing his story and listening to others share their stories.
Keep coming back. It works if you work it.
I am in recovery and I stumbled upon this book after reading the Rolling Stone article on Wallace and then reading his Harpers-Cruise-Ship thing which I thought was hilarious. My mom sent it for my birthday and I never started reading it until a month ago. Its totally cool I just found this site although I am about 200 pages behind I am going to Jack it up and get to the middle of the pack.
Wallace nails AA perfectly, as he also does the descriptions of getting high. It makes me glad I am where I am now (6 months clean tomorrow – halfway to the cake) and it only strengthens my resolve.
Dave, you will be missed, but damn you outdid yourself with this book. Awesome.
Look for more posts, and if you think you have a problem, get to a meeting. I wish I did about 20 years ago before the disease almost removed my map.
I hope this works for you. Have you tried meetings? I don’t know if recovery is so much of a go-it-alone thing. But I’m definitely no expert.
I have known many alcoholics and addicts over the years. One thing that really struck me while reading is that I think the book does take the view that recovery requires bottoming. This is something they tell you in AA–that people have to bottom out to recover. All the people I know who never get free of their substances are people who did not bottom out–they are functional. I’m not saying it is impossible to get better without bottoming out. I just realized that, in some ways, it is rather unfortunate to be a functional alcoholic/addict. There is an enormous amount lost in life–well, life itself–but it is hard just to get the motivation to go and find it because the substance drains that motivation away. The whole point of the substance is to not have to fully experience life, maybe. And obviously, it is a coping mechanism, as you point out. Why bother giving up unless you get really, really desperate to the point you can’t go on?
So I guess Erdeddy bottoms out, so does Joelle, Gately definitely does. The suicidal woman doesn’t seem to, quite.
I really, really understood that AA idea of surrender from this book. Like you just have to give up.
I just love the description of Gately’s recovery. It’s the best thing in the novel, in my opinion. I was very sour on the novel until I got into the Gately parts.
I wish sometimes that it was possible for the people I am close to who are deep in their addictions but very functional to focus on the things they are missing. In the end, it’s actually everything. You miss having a life, other human beings, etc. But it’s hard to really see this when using. It’s not hard to relate to the idea of trying to escape pain and suffering. I think that is very brilliantly conveyed in the book as well. It makes total sense why people dive into their substances. In the book, it always makes total sense. In actual life, we don’t usually know enough about people to understand it.
I’ve never been an addict. I’ve only been a user who was lucky enough never to get addicted. So I’m unfortunately having the opposite experience reading the book and remembering how much I miss using substances. Those parts are also compellingly written. Addiction would not result from substance abuse if substance abuse was not extremely enjoyable at first.
This is so, so true, and I’ve actually been thinking about the “functional addict” question all day today because that’s basically where I’ve been filed away for the past several years, I think. What do you do about these people, who may never “bottom out” but who will go through life in this terrible, substance-addled gray area? Many of these people — and I know way too many — will never, ever, end up at any Meeting. And this seems to be one of the beauties of IJ for me, and you’ll have to pardon the totally crude metaphor that’s about to come, which is totally contra the recovery process described in the book, but IJ is almost like “Recovery in a Can,” and my hunch is that there may be a fairly significant subset of functioning addicts out there for whom something like this book is exactly what they need. In a way, I feel like I’m guinea-pigging this hypothesis right now.
I had a roommate that got sober when we were in our 20s. The Ennet House and AA scenes (particular the crocidiles at White Flag) took me right back to sitting in our living room, chugging coffee and chain smoking after they would all come back to our apartment after a meeting. I am not sure how much of his influence was the Boston AA scene and how much was the Bloomington-Normal IL AA scene. Or maybe AA is pretty much the same everywhere. Gately’s talk about the cliches and “belief in a Higher Power” is nearly verbatim of conversations from my living room. Tennis and the Nuck separatists are fascinating but the Ennet Housers feel like people I know.
Inifnitedetox-best wishes with your Recovery. One day at a time.
This is a very interesting conversation. Thank you to everyone who has shared their personal experiences.
My first try reading this book (got 25% in) I didn’t get it. That doesn’t mean it’s not interesting. I know I have put down a couple other books that were heavily about drug use (On The Road, Naked Lunch) because I found them intensely boring. Before, I was only interested in the UNAN/Canada struggle thing and the Entertainment. The drug part was meaningless to me.
Right now, my roommate is a raging cokehead and alcoholic. I thought he was recovering when he moved in, and I haven’t kicked him out because he’s managing to function. Anyway, this aspect of IJ is much more interesting this time around because I have seen methheads on the streets, and seen friends do stupid things that hopefully aren’t longterm, and meditated on my own substance use.
I am not an addict, but if I were, I’d be like Geoffrey Day. I have laughed at everything he’s said. I love how he says AA basically thinks everyone is an addict, cause if you deny it, you’re just in Denial. My mother worries that I’m an alcoholic, and it’s really hard to explain to her that I’m not without sounding like Day. Insightful.
I was turned on to DFW this past winter, in the small wave of media attention surrounding his death. The first NYT article about it (his death) put a strong emphasis on the strange following he had garnered; they weren’t particularly many, but they were crazy– like frothy mouth crazy–about him. So I started reading up and instantly got hooked.
Joining this conversation is very exciting. I once heard a Google CEO say that the one lesson he’s learned in his Google time is that people around the world are remarkably similar. It’s comforting thought, but it does seem that most of the time people are very different and strange. Finding DFW’s online followers is, thus, pretty nice. Looking forward to hear more.
Cheers.
Thanks for the post. I find Gately’s story and the AA philosophy a great help in reading the novel. You really have to surrender to the book to get through it. Even if you don’t understand, even if sections piss you off, even if you find the author racist, sexist, classist, precious, wordy, etc., if you want to experience the book, just keep reading. If you have to skim, skim. If you quit, quit and come back. (I only made it to page 50 the first time. Now I’m up with the group.) Just keep telling yourself, “One Page at a Time”.
First, thanks to the infinitedetox for sharing this story, and congratulations to you for taking the steps. Continued good wishes.
Second, I freely confess that I usually don’t like to read stories dealing with addiction, relapse, destructive behavior, and the like, because I find someone else’s downward spiral to be an incredibly frustrating thing to observe, and that frustration is not the kind of book (or film) “pleasure” I really want to spend my time on.
This book has been an exception to that. I approached the AA discussions with trepidation, for the reasons outlined above, but the frustration didn’t come. Perhaps it’s because the the AA passages are in the redemptive phase? I don’t know. What I DO know is that the themes regarding free will and personal choices in the AA sections of the book are one more aspect, one more facet reflecting the Choosing theme that seems to underly just about everything is this book (and that is the focal point of DFW’s Kenyon College address). I’m finding these sections to be a quite moving and powerful presentation of the idea that it is an individual human responsibility to choose how we react to and act in the world around us.
I am inspired by the AA passages and by the book as a whole (so far) in a way that I have never been by traditional presentation of religious ideas. This has taken me quite by surprise.
Thank you infinitedetox for your courageous post. Your recently-initiated blog is brilliant. What a great way to be taking care of yourself. And what a mind–good to see you are not taking it for granted. I especially needed your Eschaton bullet points and related commentary.
I’m personally a bit disappointed that DFW has no female Crocodiles. Hope there are in real life.
Glad your restful true sleep is coming back. That’s a big dent in things. Best of luck to you.
truly great to hear you.
[...] of two lifelong interests: Cold War politics47 and games48. As the addiction material did for infinitedetox, and the tennis did for Andrew, and the radio show did for Michael, this was a portion of the novel [...]
[...] was really affected by infinitedetox’s post about his own dependencies and how he was viewing his recovery through the lens of IJ. The section [...]
I’ve been on the wallace-l list for years and years, me and my friends absorbed IJ and loved it and used it as part of our common language, and I’ve sought out as much commentary on this book as I could find, but this is probably the first time that I’ve read an essay that exactly reflects my feelings toward this book: beyond all the linguistic games, postmodern razzle dazzle, dark humor, big words, poetry, Big Ideas, and footnotes, is this half-buried idea that DFW wrote this book with the idea that maybe it would help others who suffer from addiction and/or mental illness. I think its helped me and it sounds like it helped you. Good luck. As IJ makes it very clear, it doesn’t get easier from here, but maybe it will be a little less lonesome…
“…beyond all the linguistic games, postmodern razzle dazzle, dark humor, big words, poetry, Big Ideas, and footnotes, is this half-buried idea that DFW wrote this book with the idea that maybe it would help others who suffer from addiction and/or mental illness.”
I’ve been thinking about this, too, and a lot since re-reading the passages/description of THE JOKE, the film by Himself that was essentially a camera turned back on the audience. And how the film critics kept scribbling away, trying to deconstruct the film/to find the deeper meaning.
Well, it seems to me that the thrust of IJ is the way the camera is turned back on the reader, nearly all the time. So you may find yourself gaging how possibly addicted you are, how mentally ill you are, how much a passive consumer of American culture you allow yourself to be (and what choices you actually make)–are you bottomless or are you Don Gately? Are you Orin (unexamined) or Hal?
It’s pretty amazing. This (infinite) Joke.
thank you for this. very thoughtful – i wish you well.
[...] came infinitedetox’s courageous post, which is one of the most powerful blog posts I’ve ever read. Just as a lurker at Infinite [...]