"I Want to Be Like That"

Note: This was originally published on 9/21/08.

Lately, Mary Beth and I have been feeling sad over the death of someone we both admired. David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and others, killed himself on September 12th.
I think his death hit us hard because we both recognized something of ourselves in his writing. Here's how Wallace himself described the phenomenon: "There's a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do... I feel unalone -- intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I'm in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness."
I think anyone who read Wallace's work and knows the Enneagram would have to say he was a head-triader. To me, he seemed to travel on that line between 5 and 7. Take Infinite Jest, for instance -- one thousand and seventy-nine pages of a complicated, intricate, heavily-endnoted, funny, humor-covering-horror can't stop thinking/talking novel. Having gone on (and on) in different voices (with different dialects, vocabularies, time frames, and perspectives) for 127 pages, it hits a quiet spot on page 128.
This is where Wallace introduces the character Lyle, a guru who lives in the weight room at a tennis academy:
"Sometimes the newer kids who won't even let him near them come in and set the resistance on the shoulder-pull at a weight greater than their own weight. The guru on the towel dispenser just sits there and smiles and doesn't say anything. They hunker, then, and grimace, and try to pull the bar down, but, like, lo: the overweighted shoulder-pull becomes a chin-up. Up they go, their own bodies, toward the bar they're trying to pull down. Everyone should get at least one good look at the eyes of a man who finds himself rising toward what he wants to pull down to himself. And I like how the guru on the towel dispenser doesn't laugh at them, or even shake his head sagely on its big brown neck. He just smiles, hiding his tongue. He's like a baby. Everything he sees hits him and sinks without bubbles. He just sits there. I want to be like that. Able to just sit all quiet and pull life toward me, one forehead at a time. His name is supposedly Lyle."
Every time I read that line "I want to be like that", it just knocks the wind out of me , because I think the voice here is finally Wallace's own. It's like when Philip Larkin (a poet Wallace liked a lot) says "That vase" at the end of "Home is So Sad" and I feel like a string has been pulled and I am unravelling.
To me, this is the space of 5 -- between Zen and that endlessly chattering explosion/ implosion of the mind.
Here's Wallace on some stuff that seems pretty Enneagrammatic, from a commencement address he gave in 2005:
"In the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.
They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible -- sounds like "displayal"]. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
That is real freedom. That 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."

Fear and Anxiety in Nashvegas: Enneagram Autobiography Class 3 Recap

Before session 3 of the Enneagram Autobiography class, there was a Mexican dinner in the social area of FUUN. During the dinner, we were asked to say a few words about the topic of the class. I tried to win over prospective new students by saying we would be "exploring issues of fear and anxiety." Shockingly enough, a couple of new people came to the class anyway.

As is our way, we went around the room sharing our thoughts. The two most popular homework questions turned out to be "How do I know that I am loved?" and "What does focusing on your differences with other people cost you?", so most people spoke to those.

We talked about differences and the creation of drama in relationship to type 4. The 4s in the room denied being dramatic. That is not the way they perceive it at all and they explained their behavior, rather, in terms of being sensitive.

I recommended the book Emotions and the Enneagram, by Margaret Fringes Keyes, as an insightful take on the Enneagram as a whole and type 4 in particular. It explains how 4s romanticize loss and use melancholy to stave off real depression. Mary Beth talked about connections between personality type and brain chemistry and recommended Riso and Hudson's book Personality Types, which correlates Ennegram Types with the DSM, and a website called something like "The Enneagram: A Clinical Pharmacist's View." It seems that this site has been taken down, but I was able to find the pahramcist's description of type 4 here.

Next, we segued over to the head triad -- the triad associated with fear, anxiety, and worry. I was reminded of this church sign I photographed recently:

We meditated a bit, and having acheived full Presence, were able to fully notice things like how funny-shaped the room was and that it had closets. If you would like to have such revelations at home, follow the instructions on page 217 of The Wisdom of the Enneagram.

We spoke of type 5 and their love of skulls and dead chickens. I found myself talking at length about the "effective" combination of the type 5 propensity for ignoring one's emotions combined with the type 4 habit of making a really big deal of them. It sound like a paradox, but it has played out in my life, and there were a few knowing nods in the room.

For homework, we suggested the consideration of the following questions from The Wisdom of the Enneagram:

"Record your observations about isolation. What kinds of situations cause you to detach emotionally? What are your attitudes about people at such times? About social life? About yourself? Can you recall any incidences from your childhood that you feel reinforced this tendency in you? Did you feel engulfed by others' needs or intruded upon? What would it take to be in relationship with others and not lose your own sense of purpose?"

"Record any examples of times in your life when you let significant opportunities for growth and challenge pass you by. Why did you decide to let them go? Would belief in your own abilities have changed the outcome?

Recall some times when you did fly against common sense and took a chance. What was the outcome? How did you feel at the time?Are there areas in your life now where you know that you are resisting your true desires out of fears or doubts about yourself? What can you do differently?"

Up next: More fear and anxiety, as Mary Beth leads the discussion on types 6 and 7.

To Prepare: Look over pages 235 - 286 in The Wisdom of the Enneagram.