New Spiritual Musing: "A Way Out of the Darkness"

A Way Out of the Darkness

“There is but one truly serious philosophical

problem, and that is suicide.”

—Albert Camus

          I’ve been steered in this direction for quite some time now, especially this past week when I went online to research David Foster Wallace who wrote the best-selling novel Infinite Jest that stirred up the literary world with the promise of a new literary light; but D.F.W. committed suicide on September 12, 2008 at the fecund age of 46, just when he was coming onto his own as a writer, and I wrote a poem on the effect he had upon me:

The Way of Literature

Deeper and deeper into the mix,

he’s the zeitgeist behind the chaos

of a tortured mind, exposing himself

like a trench-coated compulsive proudly

showing himself to strangers, an aberrant

tick, never telling us why he is this way

(wearing a bandana because he can’t stop

perspiring), only doing what he must do to

satisfy his self-obsession. D. F. W., what 

a genius, what prophetic wizardry, what a

tortured soul you are; no wonder you chose

to exit to the other side, this world was too

much for your rapacious mind to process,

resolve, and understand, a joke, an infinite

jest; but your light will continue to shine

until another light shines brighter, and

there will always be another light from

the eternal fire of man’s struggle, a

new zeitgeist for a new time, for

such is the way of literature.

In David Foster Wallace I saw the existential dilemma of life writ large (writers have a way of magnifying the human condition), the same dilemma that the philosopher of the absurd Albert Camus (about whom I had recently heard on CBC’s Ideas, asserting to how much influence his philosophy still has in the world) explored in The Myth of Sisyphus, the dilemma of man’s inner and outer self, or what I came to see in my own journey of self-discovery as our false and real self; and despite his literary genius, which was acknowledged by most critics who reviewed his novel (he also received a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation in 1997), David Foster Wallace, who saw life as an infinite jest, a joke played upon mankind not unlike Sisyphus’s fate, irrational and absurd, was unable to resolve the existential dilemma that finally drove him to suicide, a tragic fate that Camus considered the only truly serious philosophical problem—an act or courage, or desperation?

Of course, they blamed it on his life-long depression, for which he took medication; but despite all the medication and therapy that he received for depression and drug and alcohol addiction (which were central to his effulgent novel Infinite Jest), he still got swallowed up by his irreconcilable shadow and hung himself to put an end to his suffering, which leads to today’s spiritual musing—the dark shadow side of our ego personality, that aspect of human consciousness that is responsible for inducing the insufferable conviction that life is meaningless and absurd, that dreaded state of consciousness that we all experience at one time or another as our own nothingness and which in the annals of literature was given the most eloquent expression by Shakespeare in Macbeth’s much-too-blithely quoted, “Life is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing.”

This is not an easy state of consciousness to apprehend (only poets and mystics can see it with some measure of clarity), let alone explain; but it is felt by everyone who suffers from life-long depression, like David Foster Wallace. And even those who do not suffer from deep depression experience it, because this state of consciousness defines the shadow side of our personality; but herein lies our quandary, because who wants to believe that our shadow self is real? It’s much easier to repress our shadow than acknowledge it, until it’s too late.

Three years ago I wrote my literary memoir The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway (I’ve just published the sequel called My Writing Life) in which I explored the dark shadow side of Ernest “Papa” Hemingway’s personality, because I wanted to flesh in this concept of the elusive shadow with the real life of my high school hero and literary mentor (this was twelve years after I wrote my novel What Would I Say Today If I Were To Die Tomorrow?, which so rankled the people of my hometown for revealing its dark shadow side that Penny and I had to relocate to Georgian Bay to get away from all the hassle), but even after all the fleshing in that I did with Hemingway’s shadow-afflicted personality, I still feel some apprehension as I write today’s spiritual musing on the reality of our shadow self; but I must be true to my calling, because this unresolved state of consciousness is responsible for the existential dilemma that can pull one so deep into the despair of their own nothingness that it can drive one to desolation and suicide, like it did Ernest Hemingway and David Foster Wallace.

So, what is this consciousness of our own nothingness? How does it come about? This is the mystery of our shadow self, the repressed dark side of our personality. The writer John Irving made a comment so arrogantly offensive that I had to respond to it by writing a spiritual musing, “Chicken Little Syndrome and the World According to John Irving,” which can be found in The Armchair Guru, my fourth volume of spiritual musings; he said, “You don’t choose your demons, they choose you.” This is why I was never attracted to read John Irving after reading the novel that launched his career, The World According to Garp, because the central motif of his writing was delusory, which I confirmed by quoting something in my spiritual musing that America’s greatest seer Edgar Cayce revealed:

“While we are all at different stages of development and may be working on different lessons, we do not make much progress until we can recognize our problems as opportunities. We begin to grow when we face up to the fact that we are responsible for our trials and misery. We are only meeting self. Our present circumstances are the result of previous actions whether long removed or in the recent past. So if we are beset with problems, blame not God, for they are of our own making. Our miseries are the result of destructive or negative thoughts, emotions, and actions. We can avoid trouble and misery if we live lives of noble thought and action” (Edgar Cayce’s Story of Karma, by M. Woodward, pp. 219-220, Bold italics mine).

In their remarkable book Meeting the Shadow, The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature, editors Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams tell us why we have a problem, especially writers who are always trying to come to terms with the human condition and the existential dilemma of life, the seemingly irreconcilable problem of our paradoxical nature: “Our shadow self remains the great burden of self-knowledge, the disruptive element that does not want to be known.”  And why does our shadow not want to be known? The editors of Meeting the Shadow tell us: “The shadow is by nature difficult to apprehend. It is dangerous, disorderly, and forever in hiding, as if the light of higher consciousness would steal its very life” (Meeting the Shadow, Introduction, pp. XVII and XXI).

But didn’t Edgar Cayce say, “We can avoid trouble and misery if we live lives of noble thought and action”? Doesn’t this suggest that there is a way out of the darkness of our own nothingness? It certainly does for me, which is why I made this moral imperative the guiding ethos of my own life and writing; but then, as they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and unless one lives the life of noble thought and action one will never know.

          A tad presumptuous? But where does a writer go when they have come to the limits of their paradigm of meaning? Depression and suicide, like Hemingway and Wallace, both gifted but self-obsessed writers who wanted their cake and eat it too? “Literature is not enough,” said the writer Katherine Mansfield, who tragically died of tuberculosis at 34 at the Gurdjieff Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau, France where she sought out a teaching to expand her personal paradigm, as did I with the same teaching; but to expand the paradigm of literature by including the principles of karma and reincarnation as Cayce deemed would seriously tax the credulity of the literary world, which is why the light of literature will never be bright enough to resolve the consciousness of our nothingness, and one must imagine Sisyphus happy in his struggle as Camus did.

But we keep hoping against hope; because, as the dystopian writer Margaret Atwood said in one of her poems, “All we have is hope, but what hope is there?” And another brilliant writer will always come along, like the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard with his six-volume autobiographical novel that he ironically called, “My Struggle.”         

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