Letter to K. About Being Just a Regular Guy and the Psychology of That

I know I have an offputting and sometimes conversation-killing tendency to fall silent when someone says something particularly thought provoking. I start thinking about what was just said--and, I guess, about how to respond most laudably--and my thoughts get complicated and I usually end up somewhere in uncertainty and ambivalence and I just don't say anything. This is what I did that night on your porch in Baltimore when we were smoking pipes and drinking rye and mostly talking about something else. So, this letter is me trying to make my uncertain and messy thoughts coherent and to actually respond to what you said.

Which was, more or less: "I am just a regular guy." Which startled me a bit. In my world, your extraordinariness is something crucial. It drew me into your orbit 22 years ago, and, though love holds me there, your extraordinariness is a real and potent and exciting thing. So my habit of equivocation, in which my mind sees it both ways and is almost always stretched between two poles, right away began its dissonant feedback thing. On one side of its aisle it shrieked, not a little desperately, "No, you are not regular. You are extraordinary, and regular is the enemy that is always trying to wrestle us to the ground." But on the other side of its aisle, my mind said "Well, in certain ways you are extraordinary, but I think I know what you mean when you say you're just a regular guy: maybe being regular is simply our baseline state and when we are extraordinary we're just reaching up out of our regular mode, usually in practiced, reliable ways. We've concentrated on certain narrow ways to be remarkable, and we can rely on those ways to attract attention and admiration, etc." So, I sat there half drunk and chilled and thought, "Ok, I guess I sort of understand why K. is insisting that he's just a regular guy, despite his obvious extraordinary wit and inventiveness and psychological insight, etc."

But then, as I sobered up in the shower later, and lay awake in bed for an hour, I remembered where I had recently heard another extraordinary person claim, almost vehemently, that he was just a regular guy. In that really unsatisfying [and probably fundamentally flawed] movie "The End of the Tour," they have David Foster Wallace insist, several times, that he is just a regular guy. The David Lipsky character--a sort of angry, hurt Woody Allen with the bloodsucking drive and instincts of a mosquito--keeps scoffing at this. Lipsky insists that DFW is being coy at best, and certainly disingenuous, and probably dishonest. Lipsky, with beautifully-acted bitterness, holds up Infinite Jest as proof that DFW is extraordinary, the greatest writer of his generation. We see, in one of the few good scenes in the movie, that Lipsky very much wants to be a great writer, and that he has a high opinion of himself, and that it galls him terribly that DFW is much, much greater than Lipsky will ever be, and that he, DFW, has pretty much buried himself in a drab little house and a drab little job in Indiana, and that his life looks totally mundane and lowbrow and unremarkable. The Lipsky character keeps trying to get the DFW character to admit that he is a genius. But he wont.

It occurred to me as I walked home from the theater, like six months ago, that Lipsky had missed the tragic central point of IJ, and that DFW's impatience with Lipsky stemmed largely from Lipsky's blindness to the psychology of addiction. Without unpacking IJ much here, in this letter, I just want to summarize my reading of the whole addiction and 12-step theme in IJ: I think that DFW showed Don Gately and Hal Incandenza in psychological contrast: Gately keeps checking his ego at the door of his recovery. He sees the Crocodiles as prevailing against their addictions inasmuch as they keep the specialness of their individual stories at bay. Gately, the future Crocodile [we hope], has to continually reassert his own human universality against his specialness. He is maybe greatly aided in this by his background as a neglected kid who has never been told he's extraordinary. His recovery depends on his ordinariness. As long as he's a regular guy he stands a chance. And when he is forced to do something heroic, when he protects the residents of Ennet House from the bad Quebecquers, he ends up in extremis.

Hal Incandenza, on the other hand, is pretty much crippled by his specialness. Where Gately was neglected and never thought himself special, Hal was raised by an overweening mother who fed him "mnemonic steroids" and--simplifying here-- made it pretty much clear to young Hal that she would love him inasmuch as he accomplished extraordinary things. He was raised to use extraordinariness to win his mother's love. So, when Hal is forced to quit taking drugs, he faces not just withdrawal, but existential crisis: his ego is tied to the high, or something like that. His extraordinariness, which is what makes him worthy of love, is tied tight to his drugs. Without the drugs he may cease to be special. So Hal is facing something Gately isn't: in quitting drugs he may fall apart. He may no longer be able to maintain his incandescent specialness. He may end up being merely regular.

So I was lying there in bed in Baltimore, listening to the gunshots and sirens down the hill, thinking more clearly than when we were out on the porch half drunk, and I thought maybe I knew what you meant when you told me you consider yourself to be an ordinary guy. I think you know that you have gifts. You shine in certain K.-like ways, and you know you do. Your wit, your verbal inventiveness and agility; your special intimacy with the whole American high-low thing; your strange and super-charismatic way of unenjambing lines in a song so that they scan two or more ways, one funny, one poignant, and so on. Plus, if I may Lipsky for a moment, you have all this other extraordinary stuff: powerful charisma, physical grace, aliveness-to-senses, and, weirdly, even a kind of patience-in-impatience [which gives me hope for my own middle age], etc. I think you know this about yourself, though you don't much talk about being special. I may be totally making this up, but I guess you were raised at least a little like Hal, not so much like Gately. At some point, I hazard, you swallowed the idea that you would get love --or maybe just more love-- if you shone.

For my part, I believe my own childhood was way over on the Hal side. There was neglect, for sure, but it was nothing like how Gately was neglected. I grew up with the idea that I was extraordinary, and that I would get more and better love if I shone. I'm totally still plagued by this, of course. Thank Gawd I seem to have very little propensity for addiction. But I am psychologically crippled in other ways. I see it. I'm sure there's lots I don't see. I know it largely governs the way I live, and that it has manifested most powerfully in my relationship to my work, which is like a shitshow marriage, which is mostly what we were talking about that night. As always, thank you for being so patient with that fucked up shit that I replay endlessly.

Which brings me to intelligence and what I think it is. We, in this culture [maybe not in the world of progressive education, but you guys are special], tend to see intelligence as bandwidth. When we say that Albert Einstein was smart and George W. Bush was stupid, what we mostly seem to mean is that Einstein had fatter, faster wiring and Bush had feeble, sluggish wiring. Given the bell curve, I'm sure there's a real, natural range in humans' processing capacity. And of course there's the effects of trauma, physical and emotional. But a more interesting --and hopeful-- concept of intelligence favors drive over wiring. No proof here, but it seems to me that some people are "smarter" than others because they work at it harder. But I think it's pretty rare that a person sets out in a disciplined and systematic way to become smarter. I think most people we think of as smart became that way because they feel driven to it. And maybe the most widespread source of that kind of drive is what April Incandenza gave to young Hal: the sense that he had to accomplish something to earn her love.

I don't see any reason to believe that the most accomplished people are really all that better-wired than the rest of us. But they do seem to be more driven, narcissistic, and neurotic. Where does that come from? Probably from a middle-class parenting culture that attaches love to accomplishment. Tiger Moms. Lecturing dads. Hectoring grown-ups pushing kids and withholding affection or approval when kids are lazy.

I think it's probably true that all healthy kids enter the world with roughly the same mental capacity, roughly the same wiring. Some get a little better equipment, others a little weaker, but almost all of us are born with more or less equally capable brains. At that point, some brains are probably starved for stimulation, such as when a single mom has to be away working at Burger King all day, and other brains are well fed, sent to the best schools and lessons. Some kids, lots of them middle-class with college-educated parents, immediately start learning that their worth, their lovability, is a function of their achievement, and they learn that certain things they do make their parents smile and hug and coo and celebrate. So the kids focus on those things. And, lo, they become more and more proficient, and they earn more and more attention and approval, and the feedback loop propels them into college, and a career, and a specialty, and they become known as smart. So, in this model, accomplished is lovable is smart, and the whole package is a strongly-reinforced delusion.

The self-narration of smart is "I am special," but smart people did not start special, and I have heard very little said about what appears to be a plain fact: if you spend 15 years working hard at becoming a heart surgeon, you will be a heart surgeon, and people will say of you "That guy is smart. He is a heart surgeon." Any regular human intelligence, focused long and sharply enough, leads to the kind of accomplishment that is seen as smart, even if only a few people know what it is you do.

Thinking this way, it seems to me that insisting on being a regular guy isn't just good, healthy American populism. It's also an acknowledgment of privilege, a humility about accomplishment and how unextraordinary it is to become really good at something when you spend years working on it, and a refusal to race in the lemming-rush of specialness, which does not, after all, land us in Mom's Lap of Love, but just down there at the bottom of the cliff. I'm being sloppy and silly here, but really: being the smartest guy in the room, the most special, does not come with love. Even the respect is often grudging. And, furthermore, feeling special can exempt us, in our own minds, from being decent, loving, present, and even happy.

The tragedy of Hal mirrors the possible redemption of Gately. Hal's specialness exempts him from the real work. It makes his difficulties feel personal, and it makes his accomplishments feel existential. Hal exists, in his own mind, only inasmuch as he maintains his specialness. The pressure is on Hal to keep deserving love. Poor, neglected Gately, on the other hand, the regular guy, has a chance. He doesn't feel special, so he is free to admit he's a fuck up. He can really own that. From there, he can look up. The sea was way out. A good read of IJ, in light of DFW's history with depression and drug and alcohol abuse, and in retrospect now that we know he killed himself, is that he saw himself as Hal, but he knew that beating both the depression and the addiction depended on becoming Gately. Alcoholics Anonymous holds, at its very heart, the apparently-paradoxical principle that recovery requires the burial of specialness. There can be no special exemptions in our recovery because we have to recover as humans. We can't recover as special cases deserving of special recognition and special status. Humility, I guess, is the only way. In this model, it is the ego that is depressed and addicted, not the subsumed infant of pure potential, not the regular guy.

Now, of course I am not saying that this is what you meant. I'm just suggesting that I found a happy congruence in what you said and what DFW said. In my mind, at least, you both uttered occult wisdom. Maybe you meant something else, but let me point out that you said something super-wise even if you meant something else, and that I must be super-special for recognizing that. After all, this little essay is a performance, and I want you to think highly of me, because I respect you because you are extraordinary. But not exempt.