This is Water – Undoing the David Foster Wallace

Recently I was introduced to the talk given by David Foster Wallace (Note 1) titled “This is Water ” (Note 2), sent to me “in the context of an awareness of the subconscious, what he refers to as the default setting”, which talk later materialized into a book. 

It appears to be a wonderful presentation. Over 2 million people have viewed it so far on Youtube. Wallace makes a compelling statement which appeals to “something” in us, it seizes us on the blindside.

Wallace keeps it real when he starts, seeing things for what they are. Then he veers off to creating his own people out of what he saw. It was a reflection, of his, his own reality, a dark reality. Everything was doom and gloom. This is what fiction is, creating an alternate reality, by putting pen to paper of what is otherwise a mental reflection. 

It is wrong for us to think that the lady manning the register at the checkout counter is frustrated and fed up, of the long lines before her and everything else. That would be so if she has a problem herself. Most of us do not have a bad mental disposition that makes us perceive as bad, long queues or crying children or loud phones. We may have something particular that bothers us but that does not make us pissed off with ourselves all the time. And, most of us do things spontaneously without giving it a second thought, like helping someone.  Most people are generally happy. This is what we can find if we talk to people and find out for ourselves. Anything we infer comes from a place of our own likes and dislikes.

My natural default setting is not the “ego” self, which is an innate self-centered selfish nature in the ordinary sense in normal speak. And an ego self does not mean that everything else and everyone else is repulsive, or dead-eyed, or stupid, inhuman, or annoying or rude. It maybe so if we are in fact self-centered and selfish. And, I do not automatically experience everything to be boring, and frustrating. Most don’t think that way. To say this is the default setting only reinforces a view conditioning us to think so, by default, in duality.

The ego is the self-nature we see in ourselves and we see in others and things outside of us. We give each object a self and permanence to its existence. And we look for and see good and bad in everything and a like and dislike or neutrality, when we create our impressions of it. We give everything a name, shape, and a quality to it, which comes from us. In short we create everything including ourselves. We are duped into believing that we have a “self” but it is something we cannot find in ourselves.

If we must call something “default setting” then it is that we pursue pleasure and what is pleasurable and flee pain.  

All of us are ego beings but that does not mean we have a particular default setting that manifests as one state of mind - a default setting that supports a belief that “I am the absolute center of the universe, most vivid and important person in existence”. We are not “hard-wired at birth with this default setting”. We are not innately self-centered and selfish, which requires us to consciously think and act to suppress it. So a choice of whether we should continue in default or not does not arise. We have several states of mind, various times various mind, ever changing ever conditioning, that takes paths, and runs in streams or trains of mind. 

We have no “choice” although we would like to think we do. What we think is always guided by our habits, our sub-conscious. But we do have “will”, free will, which presents itself to us at the very birth of thoughts, at the impulsion phase. It is the phase during which full cognition takes place, in the 17-moment thought process, according to Buddhist psychology, which explains the working of free will more simply than Western psychology. At this phase we can again fall prey to influences of our habit consciousness. It can be seen in decisions we make out of ethical or moral considerations, when they may determine how our thoughts run. It is here that we can exercise mindfulness, awareness. Awareness must be bare awareness devoid of a need to conform to a certain state or disposition. 

If we can see things for what they are then what is evident as the talk progresses is that Wallace reflects his own mind on what he sees. He creates others of him and wrongly infers that others perceive and feel what he does of them. So he creates people out of his own imagination and feels depressed for them, out of his feelings of being them. In doing so he asserts his perceptions, which involves conceit (and separation from others), and creates his view of himself in countless others. In this manner he reinforces his ego, the perception of an imaginary or ideal ‘self”. And he addresses feelings that conflict with this creation that leads to confusion and depression, by asserting that it is the norm.

If you think again, his characterization of all he sees is depressing and he attempts to synthesize the confusion in emotion by asserting his view that it is the default setting, which he does by interpreting it to himself first and then to the world. By this means his ego devises the way to exist without self-destruction. Groceries shopping after work can be a refreshing experience if we allow ourselves to experience it, without projecting our anger, frustrations and emotions into it. 

We need to see things for what they are and not what we want them to be. There is nothing good or bad in anything or anyone unless we make it so, if we create it so. To see things for what they are is to see it just, as we would see the window frame when we look out until such time we find resistance when we hit our object – that is when we bear upon it all of our notions, experience and emotions. Try seeing beyond what we see, really. Try seeing things beyond shape, beauty, financial value, and so on. We can practice that by seeing through the object whilst seeing it, just like the window frame. We can also do so with representations of objects in our mind – an object we manifest in our minds. And then see how we can gradually change the way we think. As we know, most of us, we do not think of beauty or fat or thin or anything else when we think of our mother, father, brothers and sisters, wife or girl friend. We see past all of it (Note 3). It does not even figure in our thoughts, it makes no difference to us. What would then make the difference to us is the unconscious that feels their happiness and sadness.

Excessive self centered and selfish behavior that makes us unable to see pleasure but only pain is at odds with the very core of our ego-being that was born in the sensual plane out of a need for sensual experience and gratification. So here is the conflict. If we cannot overcome this conflict it must result in the destruction of the ego and the self, initially manifesting in a self-pitiful disposition, later in depression, and eventually in suicide.

And, the “something” that appealed to us and blindsided us that was given to us in the form of empathizing with others is a reflection of our pity rather than compassion. We are blindsided when we see and hear what we like to see and hear. 

Pity is not compassion, it is an emotion that arises not from compassion but from selfishness. It is a conscious act of thought, or of thought and deed, which is a benevolent act, which is consciously acted out. Compassion is not a conscious act as some would like to believe. Compassion arises out of the sub-conscious, the unconscious, from the goodness of our heart, which sounds a banal platitude no doubt. It is what it is for what arises from the sub-conscious and what is unconscious is what we think from our heart and not our mind.

Compassion arises in the absence of wickedness. Wickedness arises from pride. It also arises from the absence of mental pain, when we are not pained personally by what we experience – which is when we are thankful, consciously or unconsciously, that it is not us who are pained. It is when we do not see our own pain as our own but rather others pain as our own. This happens when there is an absence of separation, between “I” and “You”, so I feel as you do.

Proud, we may think we are not, as no pride we show, but it does exist in us subliminally, in thoughts when we delight in, in what we think out and assert to ourselves, our view of things and the world. And when something does not agree with our views, as little as it maybe, we have something that swells in us, a certain indignation that may show up as a change in the color in our face, an opposition to what we sense, which compels us to assert what we believe in, from which may arise a certain wickedness in our effort to safeguard our belief. That is when we tell ourselves “serve him right, he should not have done that. He deserves what he gets”. Out goes compassion.

According to psychoanalysts 95% of our emotions are determined by our subconscious. All of it is the workings of the subtle mind, the unconscious. It is what is there and we do not sense. It shows up in all of our unconscious acts, and the subtle body language, which is once again estimated to constitute about 95% of all of our communication. Take a moment, pause to think, we can see it well in our monkey mind, the mind that jumps from one to another – of thoughts that appears to spring from nowhere and seem to vanish to nowhere when replaced by another.

When we are blindsided, we do not see, and what blindsides us, like what Wallace does which is read by our subconscious, evaluated and interpreted by emotion, experience and the state of mind present, can easily manipulate our thoughts. And they are unconsciously inscribed in us, in our subconscious, for future reference, future evaluation. It happens to us at every level, from birth, and every time we put on the TV or listen to news selectively presented to us, either consciously by those who wish to manipulate us or unconsciously, like Wallace, from pity for others, a mistaken goodness out of ignorance.

If an action arises out of pity then it is a benevolent action. But a benevolent action can arise from both pity and the heart, from compassion – from love, from experiencing joy for others and from evaluating things with an even mind, without discrimination - of mine or not mine, or what is like mine or not like mine. We also see it everywhere, when we mind our own business, when we close our mind to us from others, mistaking that minding our own business is the best policy, when we should in fact be exercising discriminating awareness. It is wisdom in action, rather than ignorance in inaction or stupidity in action.

For us to be able to see it that way we need to resolve the confusion we have in our own mind. It is the confusion that arises from the ego in its tussle between feelings and perceptions that we talked of earlier, which is beyond our usual conscious awareness. This is bare awareness, seeing things for what it is, involves both seeing us and seeing things outside of us.

Wallace was long winded in his commencement speech, long enough to mishmash in confusion. But most may disagree due to the plenty of ear-catching allegory that spins the mind to what we like and what we relate to. And so we would tend to pick and chose and find our way. And what remains is our concise edition of it, which would be what is more or less found in the video, is a good enough snapshot to come to the analysis I have. 

Wallace gets it right when he speaks of the Capital “T” truth, that “ value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: "This is Water"". It could perhaps be paraphrased to read “real education has nothing to do with rote learning or scholarism but simple awareness, an awareness of our self and the nature of all things”. It must surely be wisdom and awareness and not awareness out of ignorance.

Wallace says real freedom “is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing”, is in fact wisdom. It is a difficult truth to arrive at for those of us who are in the “Wallace default setting”, that he says he is in when he says “If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable", especially when we are so blatantly, cogently told so, and we unconsciously tell ourselves that that is indeed the default setting.  It would be delusional to think we can control everything with our conscious mind, doing so would be like trying to keep the tsunami away by closing the gate to our backyard.

Freedom is abundance of thoughts, feelings, objects, hope and love, when we understand the way how all things actually exists, one devoid of an essence of good or bad, one that is impermanent except when it is in our minds, one that is to be enjoyed for what it is. It is freedom from concept, from fear, from doom, and gloom. 

It is when we release ourselves from the shackles of the mind, that keeps us imprisoned, boxed in, give us fear. It is just emancipation from it all, like when the lid is blown off the head, like when we kept everything behind when we had that real vacation sometime in our life, perhaps in our childhood, long before we became “Wallace default set”. It is when we can see the best in us and us at our best.

To do so we need to separate ourselves from what separates us. We need to separate our self-nature from what we think. We need to be less and less judgmental. We need to separate our disappointments, our sadness, our anger, and our notions from the image, the person behind the image. We need to see it “just” and not from separation. We could also see things in their duality, from happiness, out of love and compassion.

Listening to Foster Wallace was disturbing. He should never have been allowed to make that speech to so many young minds. It teaches impressionable minds to think in a way that transfers their own negativity to everything else, creating a reality of gloom. It also gives them a “norm” of a misconceived “default setting” that enables the subconscious to find refuge in the confusion thereby initiating the conscious mind to follow suit and inhibiting an otherwise conscious mind from being put upon inquiry. Had the reflections been of joy or bare awareness then the outcome would be completely different. 

Anyone who thinks in the way that the speech reveals, based on their own feelings or on the observations of someone else’s, would be how their subconscious works, must suffer from depression. And, by believing that the way to get out of the default setting is to constantly remind oneself of it Wallace only makes it worse, which could well lead to clinical depression (Note 4). Although most people who have depression do not kill themselves, suicide rates among those who are diagnosed as clinically depressed appear to be high (Note 5). 

One of the four sub types of suicide is Egoistic suicide (Note  6) . It reflects the prolonged sense of not belonging and not experiencing integration in a community. It is the result of "excessive individuation", that is when the individual becomes increasingly detached from other members of his community, which can give rise to meaninglessness, apathy, melancholy, and depression. 

So this led me to look further, and I found that Foster Wallace committed suicide three years later. He had suffered, not surprisingly, from deep depression. I may sound unkind in my critique, but this is what it is, the product of a confused and conflicted mind, in pain.  

Wallace was in fact crying out for help. But sadly none of us were able to see it then. Instead we patted him on the back only to reinforce his own view and divide between what is real and what is fiction.

What the two plus million hits on Youtube and all the positive comments that have been made tells us is that a majority of us could relate to the “Wallace default setting” in one way or another. That could be something troubling given the statistics that reveal that about 10% of all Americans suffered from depression at some point in their lives in 2012, up from 5% in 2005-2006. It is a broad statistic I agree, which has many components to it including depression caused by terminal illnesses which has been on the increase, that could skew it off whack, to wit, discount we should not, for it is the body that tells what the mind thinks.

Someone needs to undo “This is Water” of Wallace. It is a psychological cluster bomb in that it is something that conditions our subconscious by our tacit acceptance of the “Wallace default setting” as the norm, upon which we can fall back on, out of self-pity or as a defence mechanism, with symptoms of depression manifesting later and much later on. It will alter our reality, how we see the world, as one of darkness, doom and gloom, and from a mistaken sense of compassion.

Notes:

1. David Foster Wallace (1962 -2008), American novelist, professor of English and creative writing. His novel Infinite Jest in 1996 was cited by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.                                                                                       
2. Commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College on May 21, 2005. Kenyon College, a private liberal arts college in Gambier, Ohio, United States, founded in 1824 by Philander Chase is the oldest private college in Ohio and is affiliated with the Episcopal Church. It was later followed by an essay titled “Some thoughts, delivered on a significant occasion, about living a compassionate life", and a book.                                                                                  
3. The Buddhist classification of all things would make us see things for just what they are, what we would if we were to see all things for their functions as the supporting, binding, maturing and motion elements, that have properties of hardness or softness, cohesion and flowing, hot and cold and expansion and contraction, figuratively known as earth, water, fire, and wind.         
4. Clinical depression or Major depressive disorder (MDD), is a mental disorder characterized by a pervasive and persistent low mood that is accompanied by low self-esteem and by a loss of interest or pleasure in normally enjoyable activities and must be severe enough to cause noticeable problems in relationships with others or in day-to-day activities, such as work, school or social activities.                                                                                                                        
5. To be diagnosed with clinical depression, one must have five or more symptom for major depressive disorder stated in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published by the American Psychiatric Association, over a two-week period, most of the day, nearly every day. At least one of the symptoms must be either a depressed mood or a loss of interest or pleasure.                                                                                                                                                
6. One of the four sub types of suicide according to French sociologist Émile Durkheim is Egoistic suicide, which reflects a prolonged sense of not belonging, of not being integrated in a community, an experience of the absence of something that tethers one, that can give rise to meaninglessness, apathy, melancholy, and depression. He refers to this type of suicide as the result of "excessive individuation", meaning that the individual becomes increasingly detached from other members of his community.