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David Foster Wallace can go fuck himself…
Yeah, I know that sentiment is horribly uncouth – especially considering I’ve never seen a corpse raise just to insert his decaying member into his own no-no place – let me try again… fuck his ghost. Preternatural or not, ghosts are imprinted reverberations, legacies, specters of corporeal memory and perhaps in his case, the resonating regret of a time card punched too early. Artists and thinkers haunt us with ideas; David Foster Wallace cursed me with his idea of the “Default Setting” which he describes in a famous commencement speech:
We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. – David Foster Wallace
What about us abby normal mutants, those of us with divergent defaults that are deemed too heretical by social standards? Those with patterned behavior deemed uncomfortable by psychologists and psychiatrists alike? Are these widely diagnosed default settings so terribly wrought with garrulous acts that it better to tune to the medium? Why am I alien to the rhythms without harm to the bettered and buttoned? Is muting my awkward always good for the gander? The Default Setting is an unintended transgression forever burning since birth… so how much control do we truly have over it?
… [The Default Setting is] an instinct that has been instilled in us- a certain way of perceiving the world,” Wallace furthers. – David Foster Wallace
Ah, the duel of the fates: Nature and nurture. Do these big N’s hex our chemistry with sour neurological mechanisms? Doesn’t matter, I submit. They’re here and we had no want or aim to host them. So how do we commune without muting?
How about an osteomancy of self? Can we soothsay with my calcified bones on how to rid trauma by smattering them against a wall? Better yet, can we work in congress with the deluge of defunct defaults in a harmonious alliance? Or are we simply able to decline trauma? Is trauma, the dour hard luck and bahumbug outside interference, a default setting worth being in congress with? Am I just a weird asshole that everyone must suffer?
I must admit, I have no knowledge of David Foster Wallace as a person, nor do I keep Infinite Jest on my toilet tank for others to see at dinner parties. I don’t care to judge or exorcise his suicide as the sum of all his parts. I care not about his actions as fallible flesh. This is an upheaval of his echo. This is a meditation on my echo and the phantom machinations that may tend them. It also may be a surrender to his ghost; a surrender to communing with this “default setting.” And “Magick,” or consorting with the unseen rhythms of the universe, can and should assess the subconscious to generate harmony in the self. So where is this communion of the “other” – the “other” that is brain chemistry? This is a path I’ve yet to see fully explored within the mental health realm. Why? Magick is merely to consort with the self… or selves… to conjure a life well lived. I think in conjunction with treatment and spiritual praxis, there is a glaring opportunity for those afflicted with neurodivergence and other mental health “ailments” to find center, to squint their spirit ears and tune, to worry a little less about the mess we’re in.
“…in ceremonial magick we sort of devise a language, a tether to the “other” that is our brain chemistry in evenflow.”
It’s as if Trauma is a Goetic demon rapping, knocking the back of our brains. Do we banish and curse their annoyance? No, in ceremonial magick we sort of devise a language, a tether to the “other” in evenflow. Brain chemistry is as grumpy and tricky as a deity evoked for certain needs and pushes… and there should always be a caution and reverence paid to its interference. To the neurodivergent mind, the somatic self is a deity worth consoling and binding, wholesale, not numbing or exorcising.
“…I’d rather create a sub-dimensional rift of human skin, emotions, and behaviors than consort with my default setting…”
I was 26 years old when my sullen and sour was finally investigated by experimenting with popular treatments. No longer was I self medicating with only the illegal substances I had long suffered. I’ll forever joke about my righteous prohibition of pharmaceutical help, one that just sublimated with even more dirty and dangerous drugs. My fever use of extreme substances, no matter the polarity, was clue number one that I’d rather create a sub-dimensional rift of human skin, emotions, and behaviors than consort with my perceived “default setting.” It didn’t matter if it exacerbated my mania in tundras of lofty ambitions or anesthetized my days in dead eyed stares… I couldn’t handle me, or what I feared was my default… this unmitigated me. Turns out, no “me” is truly unmitigated, but it is how we commune with the tools and tussles that maketh a me all along.
Again, 26 years to finally heed popular medicine, however it only took me 5 to expunge the pharmacopoeia. To be completely honest, I still struggle with whether or not to re-calibrate and start over. Sometimes the beast bone rattles so fervently that my equilibrium becomes a prison. Even now, I still have not found my communion with my divergence, and I suppose I never will. That’s the beauty of divergence. Resolve is uncannily uncommon.
“I began to yearn for mania, I yearned to personify flint and steel with nothing but a reality made of kindling.”
There are default rhythms, however, not settings, that tick the tempo of the day willy nilly. I must continually conduct and improvise with these sometimes impenetrable Max Roach like drum fills to achieve a balance. I am not complaining, I dig the BPM hustle. When in the throes of too much medical interception with medications, I lose the jig. These copious amounts of medications I surrendered to create this new default setting, one that sullied these “natural” rhythms into hushed hums, became a sonic membrane blocking what makes my fingers flicker and my brain gab. I began to yearn for mania, I yearned to personify flint and steel with nothing but a reality made of kindling. I yearned for dynamism. As a creature confounded to the wiles of inspiration and disenchantment, I had found a setting that absolved me of those polarities. Was this the medium I have to tune to as to not irk others? The great nullification? What once was an algorithm for jazz rhythms would putter through an amputee drum circle. Chins and heels still make sound when thrusted on bongos, hell, even in correct meter at times…but at what a sordid effort! So much struggle for so little elation. I needed the extremes to dance with in between.
Off the meds I still have these tufts of enterprise, but I also get the dour too: Days as a dead lighter with a calloused thumb, blistered and annoying enough to just forget igniting a fire altogether. You can win, just not all the time. I’d sacrifice a hum for a cannon drum any day.
“To work with my biology and brain chemistry in a spirit model, to relieve the sullen with active praxis, is a grand and sometimes dubious gesture…”
I am not qualified to speak on behalf of the many diagnoses I had been given throughout my days. Whether it’s literally diagnosed Neurodivergent, Bi-Polar, Attention Deficit / Hyper Active or Post Traumatic Stress – I am not qualified to promote a resolve of success or transcendence from these varied diagnoses. Let me be very clear, my resolve is that the medium has always been the message, and I am forever midwifing phantom victories through the means of vexation and vulnerability to ascertain ways to work in congress with them. To work with my biology and brain chemistry in a spirit model, to relieve the sullen with active praxis, is a grand and sometimes dubious gesture. But I believe this confluence of metaphysics and mental health won’t allow me the surrender of a default setting. No, as a matter of fact, I tailor my somatic with a methodology that isn’t celebrated and practiced currents by anyone else. It should be, obviously, not in my same way, but I feel we must transcend the idea that we have something to aspire to in a sense of normaliztion, because we sure as shit have nothing to return to. So what is the default setting of a neurodivergent artist and magician? It is one seldom seen because it never needs to be.
“…default settings are never absolute for those lucky enough to never know one.”
Some of you “divergents” may be thinking that our entire somatic lives are just piecemeal conjurations of an inevitable default, one gifted, finally, at the end. I do find solace in this. We, nay I, was never afforded the certainty of an actualized trajectory, and our divergent resolutions give us way too many curiosities to explore to be at peace with that constant hum. I hope I continue documenting my Divergent Magick merely as a celebration of the crooked in search for a common chord, but not one that binds a usual melody… one that discords a course harmoniously.
So no, David Foster Wallace’s ghost does not need to go fuck himself. I do appreciate the torment his “Default Setting” solicited from me and I respectfully disagree: default settings are never absolute for those lucky enough to never know one.
I ascertain that people, such as myself, born divergent were born staticky, blinking between the cathode rays of many television channels at once. This is how I have learned to adjust my antennae to invoke a resolution no one else can see.
Keats Ross suffers, squalors, naysays, and ne’er-do-wells when all he wants is a positive consistency, dammit.
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